Measuring Subjective Well-Being and its Potential Role in Policy: Perspectives from the UK Office for National Statistics

2013 ◽  
Vol 114 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Hicks ◽  
Lucy Tinkler ◽  
Paul Allin
Keyword(s):  
Potential Role ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Subjective Well Being ◽  
National Statistics ◽  
The Uk

scholarly journals Looked after children and young people’s views on what matters to their subjective well-being

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marsha Wood ◽  
Julie Selwyn
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Focus Groups ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Subjective Well Being ◽  
Policy Goal ◽  
Children And Young People ◽  
National Statistics ◽  
Looked After Children ◽  
The Uk

Improving the subjective well-being of all children has become a policy goal of national and international governments. To meet this aim, there have been substantial efforts to identify what makes a good life and to find ways to measure it. In the UK, The Children’s Society and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) have involved children in identifying domains of subjective well-being and the indicators that measure them. However, very little is known about whether looked after children identify the same domains and indicators important to their well-being. Here we report on findings from 18 focus groups with 140 looked after children and young people on what was important to their well-being. This article reports specifically on the key areas of well-being identified by looked after children. The focus groups were the first stage of a project which has since used the findings to develop and pilot an online well-being survey for looked after children. Although there was agreement with children in the general population about the importance of some domains of well-being (e.g. relationships), looked after children identified others specific to their situation (e.g. having a good understanding of their life history). The article, therefore, argues that there is a need for a specific well-being measure for looked after children.

The Covid-19 lockdown in the United Kingdom and subjective well-being: Have the self-employed suffered more due to hours and income reductions?

2021 ◽  
pp. 026624262098676 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Yue ◽  
Marc Cowling
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Rare Events ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Self ◽  
Subjective Well Being ◽  
Data Set ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Hours Of Work ◽  
Period Data ◽  
The Uk

It is well documented that the self-employed experience higher levels of happiness than waged employees even when their incomes are lower. Given the UK government’s asymmetric treatment of waged workers and the self-employed, we use a unique Covid-19 period data set which covers the months leading up to the March lockdown and the months just after to assess three aspects of the Covid-19 crisis on the self-employed: hours of work reductions, the associated income reductions and the effects of both on subjective well-being. Our findings show the large and disproportionate reductions in hours and income for the self-employed directly contributed to a deterioration in their levels of subjective well-being compared to waged workers. It appears that their resilience was broken when faced with the reality of dealing with rare events, particularly when the UK welfare support response was asymmetric and favouring waged employees.

scholarly journals Psychocapital and Shangri-Las: How happiness became both a means and end to governmentality

2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Mckay
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Subjective Well Being ◽  
The Past ◽  
Means And Ends ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Mental Well Being ◽  
Politics Of Happiness

In this paper a paradox is revealed in the politics of well-being over the means and ends of happiness. That paradox, in brief, is that although happiness is argued to be the ultimate end of all governmentality, in order to serve as that end, it first needs to be translated into a means for bolstering the economy, for only that way can a teleology of happiness gain a foothold in a world which prioritizes economic growth as an end in itself. To show this the paper gives a history of subjective well-being (SWB) research, and contrasts it with the politics of happiness in the UK, where SWB has in the past decade been translated into a discourse around the psychological wealth of the nation via the concepts of mental capital (MC) and mental well-being (MWB).

scholarly journals Genetic basis of falling risk susceptibility in the UK Biobank Study

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Katerina Trajanoska ◽  
Lotta J. Seppala ◽  
Carolina Medina-Gomez ◽  
Yi-Hsiang Hsu ◽  
Sirui Zhou ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Genetic Correlations ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Risk Scores ◽  
Subjective Well Being ◽  
Uk Biobank ◽  
Mineral Density ◽  
Polygenic Inheritance ◽  
Intrinsic Factors ◽  
A Genome ◽  
The Uk

Abstract Both extrinsic and intrinsic factors predispose older people to fall. We performed a genome-wide association analysis to investigate how much of an individual’s fall susceptibility can be attributed to genetics in 89,076 cases and 362,103 controls from the UK Biobank Study. The analysis revealed a small, but significant SNP-based heritability (2.7%) and identified three novel fall-associated loci (Pcombined ≤ 5 × 10−8). Polygenic risk scores in two independent settings showed patterns of polygenic inheritance. Risk of falling had positive genetic correlations with fractures, identifying for the first time a pathway independent of bone mineral density. There were also positive genetic correlations with insomnia, neuroticism, depressive symptoms, and different medications. Negative genetic correlations were identified with muscle strength, intelligence and subjective well-being. Brain, and in particular cerebellum tissue, showed the highest gene expression enrichment for fall-associated variants. Overall, despite the highly heterogenic nature underlying fall risk, a proportion of the susceptibility can be attributed to genetics.

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