Defining Wellbeing

Allan McNaught

Learning outcomes

In this chapter you will learn how to:

• develop working definitions of wellbeing within a framework that will enable you to capture the complexity of the concept;

• compare and contrast the scope and the different components of wellbeing;

• identify the critical connections and interdependencies between the different components of wellbeing.

This chapter seeks to explore wellbeing as a free-standing, multilevelled and complex social construct. The chapter will argue that 'health' is but one component of wellbeing and, while the customary coupling extends 'health' to encompass the emotional and the psychological (and maybe even 'holistic'), it pre-empts our understanding and debates about 'wellbeing'. Wellbeing is a complex, confusing and contested field that would benefit from a framework within which to locate more specific definitions, and to tease out interconnections and cross-cutting issues. The prime objective of this chapter is to give readers of this book a steer by providing a definitional topography for the concept of wellbeing. By providing such a framework, this chapter seeks to make a contribution towards the thinking and discourse about wellbeing, and to assist the reader in locating the individual chapters within a broader context, while also recognising their boundaries/limitations.

INTRODUCTION

Concern with wellbeing has generated a considerable body of literature and research on its many facets and meanings. There is an increasing acceptance that so-called 'objective' measures of social and economic progress are insufficient to analyse and describe human wellbeing, whether at an individual, family, community or societal level. Wellbeing is a feel-good concept that has occupied our 'assumptive world'; it is a concept that is freely used in modern policy discourse, and has become an integral objective in many policy domains, usually without explicit definition. No one seriously opposes this development, although some commentators are amused at the onward march of 'happiness science'. The volume of literature, the elasticity of the concept, and its steady incorporation into the national political and social policy agenda, suggest that the concern and the issues demand serious attention by those concerned with human health and social welfare.

Wellbeing as a concept is frequently coupled with 'health', as in the term 'health and wellbeing'. It will be argued that wellbeing is a broader construct that has a certain moral and philosophical energy: it facilitates reflection on the human condition and provides the backdrop to public policy making and research aimed at the promotion of wellbeing as a desirable state. Therefore, wellbeing is conceptualised as an ideal state of being or existence that we and policy makers strive for, as a contemporary variant of the good life.

Background

The word 'wellbeing' has slipped into our day-to-day discussions, including in 'pop psychology', a range of social policy domains and various fields of academic research. There are competing and contradictory definitions in the literature and some works about wellbeing discuss it extensively, though without actually defining it, or claiming that a definition is impossible. Even when the term is used it is sometimes not clear if it is something profound or just a linguistic flourish. Figure 1.1 shows some of the linguistic issues with the use of the term 'wellbeing'.

Most contemporary discussions of wellbeing start from the WHO definition that 'health is not the mere absence of diseases, but a state of wellbeing' (WHO, 1947). This early coupling has led to a tradition of health being regarded as the province of biomedicine and objectivity, while wellbeing was associated with emotional and psychological states, or subjective wellbeing, and the growth of a specific body of literature concerned with measuring wellbeing as a psychological construct, as outlined in Chapter 6. The individualisation and internalisation of wellbeing is also expressed in the recent development of positive psychology or 'happiness science'. Interestingly, within the construction of wellbeing as a psychological, subjective phenomenon, some objective elements are usually cited, relating to familial, community and social factors, the built environment and the individual's command over or access to resources. That being said, subjective wellbeing is important in that it tries to encapsulate a notion of how people cope, thrive and survive, individually and collectively.

However, wellbeing can be assessed as both an objective and subjective construct. Because of the complexity of the concept, wellbeing measurement must recognise its multifactorial nature and the need for a range of tools and disciplines, as well as social and policy changes, to be involved in its promotion, measurement and expression. Clearly, some of these instruments will be less validated than others, but this should not detract from the overall integrity of the concept and the approach. For example, an assessment of how well or happy people feel, as individuals or as societies, has been demonstrated by the psychological wellbeing literature (see Chapter 6). Diener and Seligman (2004) have...