Doing the right thing: Measuring wellbeing for public policy

By M. Forgeard, Eranda Jayawickreme, Margaret L. Kern, Martin E. P. Seligman. 2011

641 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many experts now recognize that income is not a measure that alone captures the wellbeing of individuals, and governments around the world are starting to rethink the ways in which they measure the welfare of their citizens. Wellbeing is best understood as a multifaceted phenomenon that can be assessed by measuring a wide array of subjective and objective constructs. This review summarizes the state of research on the various domains of wellbeing measured by psychologists and social scientists, and provides an overview of the main theoretical perspectives that integrate these domains. Among these theoretical perspectives, we highlight Well-being Theory, which decomposes the wellbeing construct into five domains: Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment (PERMA). We conclude by formulating recommendations for future research on the measurement of wellbeing. These recommendations include the need to combine both objective and subjective indicators, and the use of a dashboard approach to measurement. This approach conveys the multifaceted nature of wellbeing and will help policy-makers and citizens understand which domains of wellbeing should constitute priorities for public policy.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Health, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2abcbc2006948fdb1189f420da6bbb4cb9eb8506

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Health

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

A multidimensional approach to measuring well-being in students: Application of the PERMA framework (2014, background): “According to Seligman’s (2011) model (see also Forgeard et al., 2011), positive emotions refer to hedonic feelings of happiness (e.g. feeling joyful, content, and cheerful).”
Exploring PERMA in spectator sport: Applying positive psychology to examine the individual-level benefits of sport consumption (2016, background): “The final PERMA domain, accomplishment, represents a person’s realisation that he or she has achieved a specific goal or target (Forgeard et al., 2011).”
PERMA and the building blocks of well-being (2018, background): “In the Goodman et al. (2017) study, the measures are self-reports by MTurkers, and there is likely a halo effect that inflates each cross-correlation, their ‘common method variance.”
SEARCH: A Meta-Framework and Review of the Field of Positive Education (2019, background): “…thinkers in the field who assert that wellbeing is a multidimensional construct, and that students need to have the opportunity to develop a diverse range of skills to build wellbeing (Diener et al. 1999; Forgeard et al. 2011; Keyes and Annas 2009), a meta-framework must be multidimensional.”
Measuring well-being: A comparison of subjective well-being and PERMA (2018, background): “…Kern, and Seligman (2011) note, ‘Just as we do not have a single indicator telling us how our car is performing (instead, we have an odometer, a speedometer, a gas gauge, etc.), we suggest that we do not want just one indicator of how well people are doing’ (Forgeard et al., 2011, p. 97).”
Integrating the hedonic and eudaimonic perspectives to more comprehensively understand wellbeing and pathways to wellbeing (2012, background): “Although there is currently a lack of empirical support, Seligman claims he is in the process of developing measures to investigate the validity of his flourishing theory of wellbeing (Forgeard et al., 2011). Keyes (2007) proposed a similar model of wellbeing, which suggests that flourishing include”
The challenge of defining wellbeing (2012, background): “Indeed, Gable and Haidt (2005) explain that ‚positive psychology is the study of the conditions and processes that contribute to the flourishing or optimal functioning of people, groups, and institutions‛ (p.”