Happiness Surveys and the Good of Ethics

We have often received reports through the MSM of the results of surveys trying to find the world's happiest country, and so on.

The most recent item I've seen that makes use of such surveys is Jim Bannon's "The Pursuit of Happiness" (EB), which uses the results of astudy comparing the 50 states, which attempted to link objective criteria with respondents' subjective life-satisfaction scores.

How does one determine unhappiness, or dissatisfaction? The failure to attain the goods that one wants or expects? How is this quantified in a survey? Some surveys may find a correlation with simplicity in lifestyle--others may not, especially when the top 5 happiest countries are industrialized. The definition of happiness is left up to the individual -- though external markers are sought to justify their impression. As far as I have seen, these surveys do not rely upon a notion of happiness universally applicable to all, a standard by which societies (and their ways of life) everywhere can be judged.

But on to my main point: it seems natural to us to think of goods as things that we possess. If we have the good or goods, then we are happy. Is this a problem of language? Does the word "good" lend itself to thinking in terms of abstractions and habits, things that we have? That is, because the word "good" is an [abstract] noun, are we inclined to seek a res that is a substance, rather than an accident. Do we find this problematic conception in other languages, or is it limited only to English? (Merriam-Webster, etymology)
Or is it more the psychology of fallen nature -- we spend much time thinking about what we wish to acquire in order to satisfy inordinate desires? Then, when we come across the word in a writings dealing with ethics, we first think of things before anything else. (Did utilitarianism/consequentialism play any role in promoting this understanding?)

Which of the Greek or Latin Fathers talked about goods as being things that are possessed? I can't remember St. Augustine's treatment. I do remember Boethius talking about the goods that are constitutive of happiness. He seems to share that conception of  the relationship of "good" to happiness with many moderns. From The Consolation of Philosophy: Aristotle does enumerate "goods" (things to be possessed) which are identified by various people as being happiness in the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics, but this is a dialectical discussion(?) aimed at showing that these opinions are incorrect.

What needs to be recovered is an understanding of good(s) of happiness primarily as an activity, and not as something that we have/possess, either "internal" to us (e.g. virtue or office/power/ability) or external to us (e.g. family). These latter goods are instruments or occasions for activity or the exercise of virtue.

If they are to be really meaningful, these surveys should not be a "sociological" study of what people want and desire and are missing, but a study of how people live. But that would probably require too much of an academic survey.

*Boethius's account, or any traditional Catholic theology for that matter, does seem to be right with respect to  naming God as our first ("highest") good. But this requires a nuanced explanation.