Measuring Well-Being and Progress

Measuring global progress through subjective well-being

Progress could in principle be measured through the change over time of average scores of subjective well-being. However, the existing longitudinal data show little improvement. These survey results are intrinsically insensitive to developments over time, because SWB is typically evaluated relative to proximate, and therefore salient, reference points, such as peers or expectations based on rec...

Viewpoint: Measuring and understanding subjective well-being

Increasing attention is being paid in academic, policy, and public arenas to subjective measures of well-being. This promising trend represents a shift towards measuring positive outcomes in psychology and greater realism in the study of economic behaviour. We describe the main measures of subjective well-being (SWB) and provide examples of policy-relevant research findings, including new accou...

Measuring mental well-being in Norway: validation of the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS)

BACKGROUND Mental well-being is an important, yet understudied, area of research, partly due to lack of appropriate population-based measures. The Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS) was developed to meet the needs for such a measure. This article assesses the psychometric properties of the Norwegian version of the WEMWBS, and its short-version (SWEMWBS) among a sample of primary...

Measuring well-being in policy: issues and applications

Measuring Well-Being and Exclusion in Europe’s Regions

The Lisbon summit of the European Council in March 2000 declared the number of people living in poverty and social exclusion in the European Union to be unacceptable, and called for steps to tackle the issue, beginning with the setting of targets for particular indicators. The targets suggested have been broad in nature but have largely concentrated on national averages. This paper seeks to mar...