Very thoughtful and helpful response. Everything Frisch touches turns to gold. I use the CASIO method, mentioned to me by Kathryn B. quite a bit. I would say that, for me, this is the most useful PP tool thus far.

Open ended questionnaires have a place, for sure. Yet they are questionnaires and they have limitations. Sometimes just sitting down and talking to somebody face-to-face can prove a wealth of hidden information far better than a quiz.

I’m excited to hear more of Frisch’s work and I hope there are articles guest-authored by him.

Hey, this was one of the first questions I wondered about when I started learning about positive psychology, “How can we determine what is really important to each person in evaluating his or her life?”

I first approached this question in wondering about how to create just the right questionnaire so that in a few questions, we could ask people about what really mattered to them. So that we could learn what are the benchmarks that people measure life by. For example, “Oh, yes, work is going fine? Yes, check. My friends I’ve seen them recently? Yes, check. Etc.”

But after learning a little more about positive psychology, and research methods in general, I am no longer a fan of open-ended questionnaires that need to be “coded” - for example, if I ask an open-ended question, and one person answers “the home is important,” does that mean the physical house or the sense of family? So it’s hard to code those kind of answers for research purposes.

So… I recommend two different ways for figuring out what’s important to you: the Wheel of Life and the QOLTC method.

1) Margaret Greenberg wrote up a great description of the Wheel of Life. If you change the instructions a little bit (which, BTW, is always happening with this useful coaching tool, the Wheel of Life - people change the section names, to apply them particularly to Leadership or Management for example and people change the question asked)… so if you change the question in Step 1 to “How much on a scale of 1-10 (10 being best), do you value this part of your life?” then you’ll learn about what things make that person happy.

2) Using Michael Frisch’s quality-of-life therapy methods, you can see here that there are 16 areas of life which you can use as a jumping off point to see how valuable they are to you. And it might be that all 16 are equally valuable. (PPND author Caroline Miller co-teaches a class with Michael Frisch - details here at QOLTC).

So, Jeff, you could try these two methods to find the areas in life that are really important to you personally, and that are more specific that the pleasure, engagement, meaning spectrums.

Best,
Senia

Is it useful to divide happiness into pleasure, engagement, eudaimonia etc?

I wrestle with the idea that happiness develops into its own neat little compartments, because at any given moment it seems more empirically valid to say that in fact there are blends of pleasure, meaning, engagement, eudaimonia, ice cream, Doritos and Star Trek Voyageur.

We live in a fuzzy world, most of the time. Do we measure someone who is satisfied with their hedonic pursuits, doesn’t feel like a deep, meaningful life is necessary and is NOT complaining about dissatisfaction as less happy than the existentially satisfied but touchy and sour?

Put mathematically…snooze alert…are we a 2 in pleasure, a 5 in engagement, a 3 in eudaimonia, a 9 in purpose or meaning? Do these numbers really make any sense, even on a 1 to 10 scale?

What does it mean to be a 9 of 10 in average happiness? Can we spot Mr. and Mrs. Happy on the street corner? What are the outward behavioral indicators of Happiness that a camera would see, that a recording device would capture?

Best aye
Angus