meanings of a good life.<sup>6</sup> There is also evidence supporting the assumption of _ordinal interpersonal comparability_ implicit in subjective well-being analysis, i.e. two individuals reporting similar answers to life satisfaction questions can be presumed to enjoy similar levels of well-being (van Praag 2007)<sup>7,8</sup> .

The literature thus supports the view that subjective well-being measures can be taken seriously, and that the insights that may be gained over and above conventional data on objective household welfare are informative. Yet, the concerns with respect to the interpretation of subjective well-being data remain. To what extent can subjective well-being measures provide reliable and consistent measures of welfare across individuals, countries and time? The objective of this paper is to understand how various subjective well-being measures are related with objective welfare measures and examine their consistency across different scales and within households.

The Life in Transition Survey (LiTS) provides a unique opportunity for analysis of the reliability and consistency of subjective well-being measures, not only across individuals, but also across time and countries. The survey was simultaneously administered in 34 countries of Europe and Central Asia in two different rounds (2006 and 2010). It includes (i) comparable data for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and, in 2010, for several Western European countries; (ii) objective measures of welfare based on household expenditures and assets; and (iii) different measures of subjective well-being (notably life satisfaction and subjective relative income questions).

By consistency and reliability we primarily mean the following: (i) in the case of life satisfaction, we take advantage of the alternative scales and examine whether the country-level and individual-level relationships between life satisfaction and important determinants of life satisfaction such as objective welfare measures and other socio-demographic characteristics are robust to the choice of the formulation of the life satisfaction question; and (ii) in the case of the subjective household welfare question (welfare ladder) we look for congruence in the accounts of subjective household welfare and measures of objective household welfare, and we also look for systematic within-household differences in subjective assessments of household welfare.

> 6 A number of other studies have similarly found strong positive associations between measures of subjective wellbeing and income, health, marriage and employment. Current subjective well-being measures also predict future behavior such as marital break-up, or job quits (for reviews of findings, see Clark et al. 2008; Dolan et al. 2009).

> 7 This assumption is further reinforced by other studies that find a correspondence between well-being reported by the respondent and assessments of the respondent's well-being by friends, relatives, or the interviewer (Sandvik et al 1993).

> 8 Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Frijters (2005) examine the more stringent assumption of cardinality, i.e. that the difference between responses 2 and 3 on the satisfaction scale is the same, for instance, as the difference between 6 and 7. Relying on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) they look at differences between ordinal and cardinal models of life satisfaction using the 11-step response to the following question: “How happy are you at present with your life as a whole? Please answer by using the following scale in which 0 means totally unhappy, and 10 means totally happy.” They find that results are largely unaffected by the choice of cardinal vs. ordinal specification.

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