Measuring Happiness and Life Satisfaction amongst Swedish Citizens: an Inquiry into Semantic Equivalence in Comparative Survey Research

A consistent empirical finding is that Scandinavian countries by international standards score steadily high in terms of subjectively reported levels of happiness and life satisfaction. Intrigued by previous findings in Denmark (Lolle and Goul Anderson in Metode Og Forskningsdesign 1:95–119, 2013, in Journal of Happiness Studies 6:1–14)), this paper confirms that this is partly due to language effects. In this paper, Sweden serves as a case study that, similar to the Danish study, seeks to determine whether it is possible to establish semantic equivalence between translated survey items. By using randomized experiments on a representative sample of Swedish citizens with fluent skills in English, we test the effects of different designs in question wordings and response scale labels implemented by international surveys. The results reveal significant differences in answers on happiness. While the mean differences are very small, the distribution of answers is substantial enough to confirm a strong semantic threshold between the English term happy the Swedish term lycklig. Hence, it requires something more to be “very happy” in Swedish than in English. Notably, language appears to have a lesser impact on the distribution of responses across language groups when using a numbered response scale with endpoint labels, indicating that a particular question design either mitigates or intensifies translational effects. Happiness, it is concluded, is not easily translated and survey practitioners should bear this caveat in mind when operationalizing the concept across countries and cultures.