ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the different approaches to the estimation of well-being, from traditional macroeconomic definition - both one-dimensional and multidimensional - to survey analysis and finally to big data and social networking sites (SNS) in particular. The reasons to focus on SNS as data sources for the evaluation of subjective well-being is not simply the increasing availability of a huge and continually updated flow of texts that the SNS provide. Social media data, in fact, also exhibit interesting methodological advantages, with respect to traditional data sources. For example, they give the social scientist and the policy makers the opportunity to know in almost real-time what people think about (or how they perceive) their quality of life, minimizing the interaction between the researcher and the observed individuals, and thus circumventing the well known “observer bias” induced by surveys and questionnaires. Moreover, a continuous monitoring of the well-being can help to disentangle the structural component from the extemporaneous one as well as any seasonality effect. Issues of SNS big data are also examined and discussed.
