Measuring National Wellbeing: What Matters to You? What Matters to Whom?

Subjective well-being in cultural advocacy: a politics of research between the market and the academy

“…We have 're-performed' (Oman 2015(Oman , 2017 an example of subjective well-being (SWB) econometrics, drawing attention to the ways in which they are presented, in order to highlight the discourses and activities that demand cultural advocacy as economics to speak to HM Treasury. In 'question [ing] … what economics does … [we] follow [a specific example of] it at work' (Mitchell 2005, p. 318), thus revealing the 'work' that subjective well-being does as it reproduces across the creative economy.…”

“…We argue that the performative aspects of these methods (Law 2009, Butler 2010) act upon research and policy with more critical consequences when based on inaccurate variables and unfinished models, and the best way to draw attention to the social effects of new methods of researching well-being for evidence-based policy-making is to 're-perform' them (Butler 2010, Oman 2015 and follow them at work (Mitchell 2005, p. 318).…”

Leisure pursuits: uncovering the ‘selective tradition’ in culture and well-being evidence for policy

“…Free text fields are most familiar in surveys as the 'Other' field where a respondent can write in their own words an answer that does not fit a predefined list. Also called open text, these fields contain rich and detailed descriptions of qualities of life, including the emotional impact of social and political phenomena on individual lives (Oman, 2015). These fields are common in paperbased and online surveys, yet survey analysis almost exclusively comprises dominant quantitative methodologies which count ticked responses to categories chosen by survey authors.…”

“…As such, they should receive due attention. Furthermore, if large numbers of people who complete surveys also use free text in them, it can make it possible to extrapolate policy-appropriate quantitative evidence through coding these data (Oman, 2015(Oman, , 2017. Despite this, free text is rarely used systematically in survey methodologies which support policy decisions.…”

Democratisation of wellbeing: stakeholder perspectives on policy priorities for improving national wellbeing through paid employment and adult learning

“…Nevertheless, wellbeing, in a general sense, is a contested concept between different stakeholders (Oman, 2015;Scott & Bell, 2013), and between political, academic and civil service elites (Jenkins, 2017). Because of wellbeing's contested nature, there are debates around the extent to which to which the promotion of wellbeing as a policy goal reflects a neoliberal approach to policy (Davies, 2015), in which psychological wellbeing can be used as an alternative metric of policy success to social justice and alleviation of income and other inequalities (Tomlinson & Kelley, 2013;White, 2017).…”