Saturday, April 03, 2010

Sufficient unto the day?

It's easy to sneer at happiness research in the abstract, but harder to brush it off when it gets personal. As part of a survey for faculty conducted by the Bringing Theory to Practice Leadership Coalition, a coalition of colleges interested in helping improve student learning experiences, I encountered this battery of questions: In addition to your perceptions and attitudes that impact your work, we also want to know more about the well-being of faculty members. The following questions pertain to how you have been feeling in the past 2 weeks. Please indicate the choice that best represents how often you have experienced or felt the following in the past 2 weeks.
These aren't questions about the state of a life, but about the frequency of feelings, which are a strange thing to try to recall, let alone count:
Interesting if in part very personal questions. I found some of them hard to answer... Does that reveal or create dissatisfaction of various kinds?