Gallup World Poll Experts to Speak at 2013 Social Mood Conference
This April 13 in Atlanta, Gallup Partner Jon Clifton and Senior Consultant Joe Daly will present their research at the 3rd Annual Social Mood Conference.
Recently, Clifton spoke with us about the World Poll and how their research findings correlate with real-world events. Read the Q&A below:
Socionomics Institute: You and your Gallup colleague Jon Daly track behavioral economic indicators in more than 150 countries. Please tell us about the World Poll “
Jon Clifton: Sure… Leaders around the world were looking for additional ways to quantify the human condition. There are a lot of leaders who know now that you can’t use GDP as a proxy for the human condition. You need something else.
SI: So what is the answer, according to Gallup?
Clifton: We knew that “something else” was going to be well-being. The way that we define well being is: “How people evaluate and how people experience their lives.”
… There are two simple evaluative questions that open up our surveys all over the world:
- Based on a scale of 0 to 10, 0 being the worst possible life and 10 being the best possible life, where do you stand today?
- Where do you think you’ll stand in the next 5 years?
And the second piece… is how people experience their lives.
SI: Is this where you get the “Negative Experience Index”?
Clifton: Yes. We found five negative emotions and five positive emotions that work particularly well around the world, and we asked people how they are doing: In an ideal world you’d have a buzzer and you’d ask people at all times of the day.
SI: In the absence of a magic buzzer, how do you go about polling people to come up with the Index?
Clifton: We say: “Please tell us about all day yesterday. Under the negative emotions, we say “Did you feel a lot of stress, sadness, anger, pain/suffering, and worry? If respondents say yes, we average those. It could be, 60% say “yes” to anger within a country, 70% say yes to pain/suffering, etc. – we take the average of those and that’s how we come up with our Negative Experience Index.
SI: And that’s where you’ve found a correlation between mood and events?
Clifton: That’s probably where we’ve seen some of the most signal strength, in terms of indexes, because that… I think, to your question, correlates with real world outcomes.
In 2010, before the Arab Spring, the number one country in the Negative Emotions Index that we looked at was Bahrain. I think it was a surprise to a lot of us, particularly because at the time their GDP per capita was so high compared to the rest of the world. What that showed us at the time is that a lot of times analysts try to explain these data through traditional economic indicators: but when you have things based on emotions you can’t.
That’s when we started seeing that these [polls] are really measuring something different. In 2011, Iraq was number one, and in 2012… my hunch is that it’ll be Syria at number one. We know exactly what’s going on in Syria right now so that’s not a surprise to a lot of people.
The top ten this year will also have a lot of countries in the Middle East and North Africa, where we always see negative emotions very high. But we also have countries like Greece and Italy that’ll probably be in the top 15 as well…
SI: This is fascinating to us, to be able to see how some of your well-being measures suggest a change in mood that precedes events. What will you and Mr. Daly present at the Social Mood Conference?
Clifton: What Joe and I will talk about is exactly how we’re measuring these things. We’ll talk about how we actually do the data collection: some of the questions we ask… and the findings. We’ll go through some of the positive emotions, some of the negative emotions and also what we’re seeing from our [additional] evaluative feeds.
Some really interesting findings come from those: things that happened before the Arab Spring, particularly with our “Thriving” metric… We’ll discuss how that probably showed a more accurate picture of the state of the human condition than a lot of the other indicators…
As I mentioned earlier, GDP per capita isn’t a proxy for the human condition. When it was established, it was established for something very specific. So when people use it for that, it’s probably being used in the wrong way. What we’ve tried to do is to get a more accurate picture…
SI: That sounds like it syncs up nicely with one of our basic premises: that events are not causal. We’re glad to hear that you’re planning to dig further. That’s big. Thank you very much for sharing and for previewing a bit of what you gents will present at the conference this spring…
Clifton: I look forward to coming down there and spending some time with you and your team.
Register now to hear more from Clifton at the 2013 Social Mood Conference >>
If you would like to receive the free socionomics content each week, sign up here.
