Possibilities and limitations of the key methodological approaches to the study of happiness

In recent years, the issue of happiness, including the practical searches for it, has become phenomenally popular. However, this trend was set many decades ago, already in the 1970s, when the first empirical studies were conducted to reveal that the personal feeling and self-identification as happy/unhappy are related to the pursuit of pleasure (i.e. to hedonism as a lifestyle). Over the past decades, happiness has become a legitimate object of conceptual and methodological research within almost all humanities, social and even natural sciences due to the fact that searches for the definition and acquisition of happiness went far beyond the limits of fiction that has always been involved in providing people with answers to questions on what happiness is and how to find one’s place in life. As a result, today every scientific discipline should outline the contours of its own interpretation of happiness albeit not a single one, not an unambiguous one and not without intersections with other disciplines’ approaches. The article aims at systematizing methodological approaches to the sociological analysis of happiness and identification of their possibilities and limitations. The authors show that sociologists can use a huge variety of works with different conceptual and operational definitions of happiness, and many methods to assess the level of happiness and the factors determining it. The presented review is not complete or final, it only systematizes the developments in the study of happiness and identifies two promising directions for further sociological searches — the “objectivist” econometric approach (happiness indexes based on social-economic indicators) and the “subjectivist” social-psychological approach (self-assessments of happiness in public opinion polls).