Happiness

How can one measure student happiness? Or anyone's happiness, for that matter.

Yearly or bi-yearly surveys do a decent job of this, but it would be interesting to see an ongoing measure of this during the year, and correlating against other events (start of year, holidays, exam time, even particular days of the week).

On first glance, a simple daily (or weekly) user rating might seem a valid solution. At the start or end of each day/week/class/<insert other time period here> the student clicks a thumbs up or thumbs down (perhaps a 'meh' option there as well). A very blunt instrument, but a starting point nonetheless. Comparisons between students might not be valid, as there are probably different circumstances and interpretations of happiness. But perhaps the more difficult problem is authenticity of the data. Someone writing in their own diary might bare their soul as there is no audience - no-one to witness them in a weak, exposed state. But as soon as there is an audience, things change. A depressed student might not want others to know of this, someone with some problems at home might be fearful of consequences, someone feeling antisocial probably won't want the hassle of someone trying to 'help.' When asked to rate their happiness every morning, students have every right to ask 'why?' or 'who wants to know?' And with good reason - this is personal data, that could be used for evil.

So trust is a huge factor here. The student would need to trust the school, the survey, the system that the reasons behind the data collection are sound. At the start of a student's enrolment, that trust is not there, and that is one of the most useful times to have access to this data.

There are other indicators one try to extract this sort of information from - attendance, participation, performance. But the accuracy of those might not be great, particularly without a baseline to measure against.