Subjective Well-Being: the Potentialities of Biographical Research

The article represents the analysis of the potentialities of biographical research on people’s evaluation of own life’s quality. Subjective well-being that reflects an individual’s perception of his or her own life serves as the significant social indicator and highly demanded area of interdisciplinary research. The article also contains a brief review of modern sociological studies of subjective well-being based on qualitative methodology. It includes the review of heuristic potential of autobiographical materials for subjective well-being studies. The phenomenon of subjective well-being as the component of quality of life can be studied in the context of people’s notion of social benefits represented in autobiographical narrative. Biographical research also provides an opportunity to analyze the connection between individuals’ time perspective and how they evaluate the quality of their own life, considering that the given connection has been discovered due to several empirical studies. Qualitative biographic research of subjective wellbeing is aimed at the analysis of existential experience and sociocultural determinants that define one’s evaluation of his or her life. The proposed approach allows to elaborate and expand existing methodical solutions for subjective well-being research.