People’s happiness is generally assessed by surveying random samples of
individuals. A typical survey question is “Taking all things together, would you say you
are very happy, quite happy, or not very happy?” People respond by choosing their level
of agreement with this question on a scale from one (strongly disagree) to ten (strongly
agree). Survey responses measure subjective well-being, what an individual states about
his or her level of happiness. Other methods have been used to verify measures of
subjective well-being. Happy people tend to smile more and their friends and family also
state that they are generally happy. Measures of subjective well-being have high
consistency, reliability and validity