I just read the excellent article by Kahneman et al. (one of Norbert Schwarz's ResearchGate publications) and was wondering if anyone has done cognitive/qualitative testing of happiness questions?
For easy access to a wide selection of current questionnaires in use you coudl look to Martin Seligman's 'Authentic Happiness' website from the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
There's not much here on testing or validation of questionnaires, but it is a good source of many that are in use today:
I think that the worst lack in happiness studies is that most of measures are subjective, and therefore the "cross-culturalities" have an inescapable specific weight (when I find references on the subject I'll put them here). This makes some indirect measures, as flow tests, be better -in my opinion (some comments in https://www.academia.edu/5397718/Happiness_as_a_Foundation_of_Philosophy_Draft_). With recent neurophysiological fashion, brain tests are increasingly used, but it remains as methodological question if analogous neurophysiological activities are equally/similarly experienced by different subjects or not.
For cognitive interviewing in general, a well known book is Gordon Willis, Cognitive Interviewing: A Tool for Improving Questionnaire Design, from Sage.