The Psychap inventory: A multi-scale test to measure happiness and its concomitants

The measurement of personal happiness in past research is examined. Although a plethora of valid instruments are available to assess the felt, affective components of happiness, none go beyond this to encompass the many personality, behavioral, and situational attributes long associated with it — except for the Psychap Inventory (PHI). A decade of ongoing research on the PHI is reviewed. The Inventory provides subscale measures of the achieved happiness, personality, attitude and value, and life-style domains of happiness as they have come to be defined in the literature. The PHI comes in two sets of equivalent forms and seems remarkably reliable and valid, reasonably free of response bias, and quite consistent across a long history of time and sampling. PHI interpretations not only hold great interest for examinees, researchers, and clinicians — they also prescribe a specific program for happiness self-improvement.