Day Reconstruction Method

The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), introduced by Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, and Stone in 2004, is a technique for measuring how people experience the activities of their daily lives without the burden of real-time sampling. Respondents systematically reconstruct the previous day, dividing it into a sequence of episodes -- like scenes in a film -- and report for each episode what they were doing, where, with whom, and how they felt. By anchoring recall in concrete, ordered episodes, the method reduces the memory biases that plague global retrospective reports while approximating the affective information obtained from experience sampling. The DRM yields duration-weighted measures of experienced well-being, such as net affect and the U-index (the proportion of time spent in an unpleasant state), and reveals how feelings vary across activities and contexts. It became a key tool for studying experienced (as opposed to evaluated) well-being and the affective texture of everyday life.