We will proceed as follows. The next section describes the Day Reconstruction Method
and documents our survey. Section 3 presents the database and descriptive statistics and
Section 4 contains the empirical results that compare global life satisfaction with experienced
utility. The last section discusses the main implications and concludes.
2. Methodology
2.1. The Day Reconstruction Method
If we want to measure peoples’ happiness on a moment-to-moment basis, we have to know
how they spend their time and how they feel during any activity they engage in. The most
direct way to do this would be to collect information on people’s reported feelings in real time
in natural settings at selected moments of the day. The Experience Sampling Method (ESM)
provides such a method (Csikszentmihalyi and Larson 1987; Csikszentmihalyi 1990; Stone
and Shiffman 1994). Participants in ESM studies carry a handheld computer which asks them
several times a day about the activity they are engaged in, their location, the time, and the
people with whom they are interacting. They are also asked to what extent they experienced a
number of subjective feelings, such as anger, happiness, tiredness, or impatience immediately
before being prompted by the machine. The advantage of ESM is that it allows the
measurement of experienced utility without any distortions caused by aspirations,
retrospective evaluations, or memory effects. Only few studies, however, have been carried
out due to the high costs of the survey design, the burden ESM places on participants, and
difficulties in conducting such a study on a large scale. Moreover, data collected through
ESM could suffer from biases that interrupt the flow of an experience due to the invasive
nature of the questioning method and from the high prevalence of missing values, which
could be non-random (Czikszentmihalyi and Hunter 2003).
So as to avoid any interruptions in the experience flow while keeping the advantage of a
short recall period to measure experienced utility, Kahneman et al. (2004b) developed the
Day Reconstruction Method (DRM). The DRM is a combination of a time-use study and the
measurement of affective experiences. The respondents are asked to produce a diary of all
activities they engaged in the preceding day, beginning with the first one after waking up and
concluding with the last one before going to bed. Once the preceding day has been structured
in the diary, respondents describe each activity by answering questions concerning what they
exactly did during that activity and with whom they interacted. As is the case in experience