Response to “Advancing the Science of Well-Being: A Dissenting View on Measurement Recommendations”

In response to Chapter 18, the authors of this chapter agree with the points made by Ryff et al. on the importance of nomenclature, the multidimensional nature of well-being, and the importance of context while holding that none of this contradicts their own recommendations. The authors revisit the rationale provided for their specific recommendations, which they believe Ryff et al. chose to ignore. They defend the view, contrary to Ryff et al., that if it is possible to include only a single well-being item on a survey then it is best to include one, rather than nothing at all. The authors note that several single-item well-being indicators strongly predict numerous relevant outcomes in longitudinal studies. They reiterate that the present recommendations are provisional and observe that Ryff et al. offer no alternative set of recommendations. The authors state their belief that a set of provisional recommendations, drawing on current evidence, will help promote the monitoring and study of well-being and is better than none at all.

Introduction

Policy-makers, researchers, employers, and governments are expressing growing interest in well-being (Diener et al., 2017; see also Chapter 1 by Helliwell, and Chapter 2 by Allin, both in this volume). Scholarly and popular works on the topic are also finding a broad audience (e.g., ...

Empirical Relationships Among Five Types of Well-Being

Philosophers, psychologists, economists, and other social scientists continue to debate the nature of human well-being. The authors argue that this debate centers around five main conceptualizations of well-being: hedonic well-being, life satisfaction, desire fulfillment, eudaimonia, and non-eudaimonic objective list well-being. Although each type of well-being is conceptually different, this chapter addresses the question of whether they are empirically distinguishable. The authors first developed and validated a measure of desire fulfillment and then examined associations between this new measure and several other well-being measures. In addition, they explored associations among all five types of well-being and found high correlations among all measures of well-being. However, correlations generally did not approach unity even when correcting for unreliability. Furthermore, correlations between well-being and related constructs (e.g., demographics, personality) depended on the type of well-being measured. The authors conclude that empirical findings based on one type of well-being measure may not generalize to all types of well-being.

Measuring and Using Happiness to Support Public Policies

This chapter summarizes the philosophical and empirical grounds for giving a primary role to the evaluations that people make of the quality of their lives. These evaluations permit comparisons among communities, regions, nations, and population subgroups; enable the estimation of the relative importance of various sources of happiness; and provide a well-being lens to aid the choice of public policies to support well-being. Available results expose the primacy of social determinants of happiness and especially the power of generosity and other positive social connections to improve the levels, distribution, and sustainability of well-being.

Response to Response

We challenge the view that “one is better than none” on grounds that single-item assessments perpetuate a simplistic view of well-being, which is out of touch with how the field has progressed over recent decades. We also question blanket advocacy for measures in the absence of substantive scientific questions that require thoughtful engagement with the prior literature to make sound measurement choices. Substantive illustrations, invoking research on well-being and health in different cultural and socioeconomic contexts, are provided. Quality control is also essential in making sound measurement choices. Numerous contenders fail at this juncture because they have no conceptual foundation and also lack rigorous psychometric analyses documenting their empirical credibility. Another critical element in adjudicating measurement quality is extent of prior usage: evidence that the measures have taken hold in the scientific community, indicated by citation counts and number of published studies. We conclude that all such quality control criteria were inadequately addressed or missing in the measurement recommendations put forth in Chapter 17.

The Challenge of Measuring Well-Being as Philosophers Conceive of It

Many philosophers find the prospect of working with researchers in the social and behavioral sciences exciting, in part because they hope that these researchers might be able to measure well-being as the philosopher conceives of it. In this chapter, the author considers how the measurement of well-being, as it is conceived of by philosophers, might be facilitated. She proposes that existing scales can be employed for this purpose, and she supports this conclusion through an in-depth discussion of an example. The author explains how a scale of psychological well-being validated in more than 750 empirical studies may be employed to measure the extent to which a person has realized an ostensible basic good. This discussion is illustrative of the general method that may be employed to bring empirical researchers and philosophers into contact in a way that will facilitate the measurement of well-being as philosophers conceive of it.

Conclusion

The chapters in this volume affirm the value not only of specialized, discipline-specific research on the nature of well-being—its antecedents, and its consequences—but also of synthesizing interdisciplinary scholarship into a coherent body of research findings, theoretical explanations, and policy recommendations regarding well-being. Each of the 20 chapters makes a contribution to more than one scholarly discipline, and many bridge the social sciences and the humanities. In some cases, a disciplinary expert engaged with the methods or findings of an outside discipline. Other chapters were co-authored by scholars in the both humanities and social sciences. Still others were written by interdisciplinary experts. Beyond the individual chapters, the volume as a whole informs the meta-conversation about how scholars might draw on their specific expertise to transcend disciplinary boundaries and contribute to the collective work of conceptualizing and measuring well-being in ways that effectively advance our understanding of and ability to improve population health. In other words, we believe bringing together work from across often siloed disciplines will provide important insight regarding how individuals and social organizations can pursue the good life and build better societies. We hope that readers will appreciate each individual chapter on its own terms while also gaining a broader awareness of how the study of well-being might benefit from more sustained interdisciplinary dialogue. Ultimately, we hope our volume will encourage further efforts at synthesis by identifying and then building on areas of emerging consensus (see, for example, ...

Philosophy of Well-Being for the Social Sciences

In this chapter, the author provides an introduction to philosophical work on well-being. He begins by explaining the specific kinds of questions that philosophers are interested in when it comes to well-being. The author then seeks to explain the role of thought experiments in philosophical work on well-being. He explains why such cases are useful and nongratuitous and describes the methodological assumptions that underlie their use. Finally, the author explains how philosophers seek to preserve a common subject matter for debate—well-being—even in the presence of radical disagreement about which theory is correct.

Assessments of Societal Subjective Well-Being

This chapter examines 10 methodological issues when assessing and analyzing societal well-being using self-reports. First, there are unit-of-analysis issues: deciding the appropriate level of analysis, accounting for individual-level score variability in societal-level scores, testing isomorphism across levels, and finding ways of aggregating and accounting for score variability. Second, there are comparability issues: researchers have sought to homogenize well-being scales with different response scales or use translated measures to compare across nations. Furthermore, there is the concern of whether well-being measures can capture the full range of well-being (both positive and negative aspects). The final set of issues are prediction issues: well-being measures may be more sensitive to negative than positive events/experiences, societal well-being may not always be linearly related to variables of interest, and domain-specific measures may be more sensitive than general measures of well-being, especially when tracking specific changes in well-being or comparing subgroups.

Eudaimonic and Hedonic Well-Being

This chapter provides an overview of hedonic and eudaimonic approaches to well-being, both with roots traceable to the ancient Greeks. The authors examine the history of each approach and describe scientific endeavors seeking to translate the ideas to empirical assessment tools. They review how these two varieties of well-being are distributed in the general population by attending to their associations with major demographic factors (age, socioeconomic status, gender, race) as well as the interplay (intersectionality) of such factors. Such information contextualizes what is known about who reports they are or are not experiencing various aspects of well-being. The authors then examine how hedonic and eudaimonic well-being are linked with multiple indicators of health (self-reported, morbidity, mortality, biological systems). There is a paucity of studies that have jointly examined both types of well-being. The authors then draw attention to changing historical conditions and what this means for the future study of well-being and health.