Somerville hopes to put happiness data to work

Through a brief, two-page survey, Somerville is seeking to gauge how happy its residents are – and to use the resulting data to help improve the city’s quality of life.

The survey consists of about 15 questions ranging from “How happy do you feel right now?” to a section measuring perceptions of city schools, local police and the availability of affordable housing. The final section of the two-page survey collects demographic information, including age, race and household income.

Directing the project is Tara Acker, the head of the city’s performance-benchmarking system known as SomerStat. Acker described the project as an outgrowth of the efforts through SomerStat to measure how satisfied residents are with city services.

“But we had never really focused on ‘How happy are you?’” Acker said.

The question has become the specialty of Harvard University social psychologist Daniel Gilbert, who is advising Somerville. Several countries, including Canada, Great Britain and France, have launched inquires into public happiness at the national level.

In Somerville, Acker said, “We’re done with all the low-hanging fruit in using data. The missing piece to thread through all of this together is the happiness research. We’ve never really asked what matters most.”

Acker said that the city does not yet know how the data will be applied. But she suggested that getting a more precise sense of what makes people happy or unhappy in Somerville could influence how the city allocates resources.

Somerville will be collecting the surveys until June 1 as part of its annual city census. As of mid-April the SomerStat office had entered data from about 2,500 of the surveys, with “stacks and stacks” still to be processed, Acker said.