The article presents methodological solutions for testing the hypothesis of the existence of social types among Russians, based on the indicators of subjective well-being. These solutions rely on the secondary conceptualization of empirical data of international comparative research “European Social Survey” and allow forming a set of characteristics for typology building. The empirical data used in this paper are responses of respondents from Russian sample (2012). A list of characteristics for typology building involves indicators of subjective well-being and stages of the life cycle. Suggested methodological solutions relate mainly to the processes of finding the factor structure of empirical indicators and forming a set of independent classification variables. These kinds of decisions appear as a result of realizing the “triple reflection” principle – examination of three components, without which typologization is impossible. These are existing experience of subjective well-being measurement; logical structure of the typological analysis including specifics of the proposed classification algorithm and the functional role of the different characteristics for building typology; empirically identified patterns (factor structure of the variables, the peculiarity of the responses’ distribution in the Russian case).