Self-reported life satisfaction
What you should know about this indicator
- The data gives the national average of survey responses to the 'Cantril Ladder' question, which asks respondents to evaluate their life on a scale from 0 to 10.
- The exact wording of the question is the following: “Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”.
- The data is produced as part of the World Happiness Report, based on several rounds of Gallup World Poll surveys.
- All figures are produced by the source using the Gallup survey weights to make the estimates representative at the national level.
- The number of people and countries surveyed varies year to year, but typically more than 100,000 people in 130 countries participate in the Gallup World Poll each year.
Related research and writing
Related data
Frequently Asked Questions
Is ‘life satisfaction’ the same as ‘happiness’?
The most natural way to attempt to measure subjective well-being is to ask people what they think and feel. Indeed, this is the most common approach.
Can ‘happiness’ and ‘life satisfaction’ really be measured?
One way to gauge whether self-reports provide a valid measure of happiness or life satisfaction is to see how well they correlate with things that typically associate with contentment.
Sources and Processing
This data is based on the following sources
How we process data at Our World in Data
All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
Reuse this work
- All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
- All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.