Internet Reviews

Joni R. Roberts and Carol Drost

Joni R. Roberts is associate university librarian for public services and collection development at Willamette University, email: jroberts@willamette.edu, and Carol A. Drost is associate university librarian for technical services at Willamette University, email: cdrost@willamette.edu.

Authentic Happiness. Access: https://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/.

Authentic Happiness is a robust website from the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “Positive Psychology is the scientific study of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive.” This well-established site is an entry point to many other sources in the field of positive psychology. According to the website, its purpose is to provide free resources where people can learn about positive psychology through a variety of means. The content on the website can be accessed through multiple entry points, including callout boxes on the homepage or dropdown menus across the top of the webpage. The underlying content for the site is built on many pages available from the Positive Psychology Center.

The greatest strength of this website is the articles written by Martin E. P. Seligman and other resources attributed to him. Seligman is the director of the Positive Psychology Center and a professor of psychology at the university. He is a luminary in the field and considered one of the founding fathers of positive psychology by some sources. Academic audiences will appreciate the more than 20 questionnaires grouped into the following areas: emotion, engagement, flourishing, life satisfaction, and meaning. Creating an account with the site is required to complete the questionnaires.

One weakness of the site is its lack of recent content. Under the section titled “Learn More,” users can find links to “Popular Books,” “External Resources,” “Scholarly Publications,” “The Seligman Times,” “Newsletter Archive,” “Videos,” “Textbooks,” and “Press Articles.” Browsing through these various sections finds content mostly from the mid to late 2010s. The “Popular Books” section is a good example of overall site content. Aside from a title published in 2023 that is promoted on the homepage, the most recent publication date of other titles is 2018. The website has a wealth of links to external sites, but some of the links are broken, and many of the links are to research centers at other institutions or organizations.

Although some areas of the website could use an update, students in the social sciences, especially those looking for an introduction to positive psychology, will likely welcome the resources provided by Authentic Happiness.—Christa Bailey, San Jose State University, christa.bailey@sjsu.edu

Center for Data Innovation. Access: https://datainnovation.org.

The Center for Data Innovation (CDI) is an online project of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), which is a nonpartisan, nonprofit public policy think tank based in Washington, DC, and founded in 2006. ITIF encourages debate of policies that promote economic transformations by highlighting technological challenges and research that accelerate economic efficiencies and social progress. CDI’s primary geographic focus is the United States with secondary emphasis on Europe.

CDI’s weblog includes “10 Bits: The Data News HotList,” which has been published weekly since 2013. Each issue highlights 10 different articles that were published online by other organizations during the past week that focused on some aspect of data or technological innovations. Topics run a diverse gamut, such as verifying election ballots in Ada County, Idaho; eliminating governmental paperwork in Thailand; and a data portal of hospital operations and public health datasets covering Scotland (all in April 2024). CDI offers free email subscriptions to this newsletter containing brief descriptions of each new resource as well as linking to each underlying resource. Sadly, there is no controlled language vocabulary. The search engine provided by CDI appears to be both erratic and ineffective when searching for keywords that are two to five letters in length. CDI’s search engine does not handle quotation marks and cannot effectively identify multiword phrases.

The CDI website does provide access to four other types of documents found under the “Publications”: “Reports,” “Filings,” “Commentary,” and “Interviews.” These documents seem to be more accurately found by browsing through the 13 major categories shown under the “Issues” tab. “Artificial Intelligence” accounts for 26% of these documents, followed by “Data Economy” with 20% and “Government” at 18%. The subjects with the smallest occurrences in this website were “Education,” “Ethics,” and “Science.” Results from choosing a predesignated subject are displayed in chronological order, but results from keyword searches can appear in random order.

Topics covered by this website clearly support academic inquiry, but precision retrieval of relevant resources is difficult to achieve for many acronyms or intersectional topics. CDI is an excellent resource for being alerted about new statistical information on diverse topics or recent advances in AI.—Gary M. Klein, Willamette University, gklein@willamette.edu

World Values Survey. Access: https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp.

The World Values Survey (WVS) is a global research project administered by the World Value Survey Association (WVSA). It claims to be “the largest non-commercial cross-national empirical time-series investigation of human beliefs and values ever executed.” It is conducted in nearly 100 countries by an international network of social scientists exploring “people’s values and beliefs, and how they change over time, and what social and political impact they have.” The WVS began in 1981 and strives to capture trends and changes over time through a series of surveys that launch every five years. Each survey cycle is referred to as a “wave.” The most recent complete cycle is Wave 7 (data for 2017–22).

The website is easy to navigate, with links to WVS publications, articles, and background including the history of the WVS, details of the survey’s methodology, and a list of WVSA’s funding partners. There are brief top-level overviews of WVS data findings, but the star resource of the site is the data itself. This is an open data source for public, noncommercial use, and the data for Waves 1–7 can be downloaded for free to SPSS, SOAR, SAS, or as an .r or .csv file. This extensive dataset is of interest to researchers in sociology, anthropology, social psychology, political science, and economics, or any discipline interested in, as WVS puts it, “analyzing economic development, democratization, religion, gender equality, social capital, and subjective well-being.”

Due to its magnitude, WVS data is not an introductory research tool. The site is geared toward advanced researchers with data analysis experience, governmental organizations, policymakers, journalists, and nongovernmental organizations. However, its open availability means it could be an excellent resource for faculty or liaison librarians to use as a teaching tool for undergraduate researchers learning data analysis and research methods.

Similar cross-national value surveys include the Eurobarometer, Afrobarometer, and the European Values Study (EVS). WVS claims to be “the only academic study which covers the whole scope of global variations, from very poor to very rich societies in all world’s main cultural zones.”

The popularity and impact of WVS data is clear, with more than 60,000 citations in Google Scholar. It is the basis for thousands of research projects. However, there are scholars critical of the ability of any tool to provide meaningful comparative analysis across so many cultures. As with any tool, researchers are advised to thoroughly review the WVS’s methodology and review the academic literature for any analysis and critique of WSV methodology specific to their topic of study (e.g., see critiques of WSV data for the Big-Five personality traits).—Mechele Romanchock, Alfred University, romanchockm@alfred.edu