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

Wellbeing and Society: Towards Quantification of the Co-benefits of Wellbeing

“…Diener et al 1985Diener et al , 1999Diener et al , 2003Kahneman and Krueger 2006;Dolan and White 2007), it has been suggested (Dolan and Metcalfe 2012;Hicks et al 2013;O'Donnell et al 2014) that to fully measure and understand individuals' subjective wellbeing, researchers and policy-makers should take into account three components: an "evaluative" or cognitive dimension, reflecting overall life satisfaction; an "eudemonic" dimension, reflecting sense of life purpose; and an "emotional" dimension, including both positive affective states, such as happiness and joy, and negative affective states, such as sadness and worry. The latter distinction has been shown to be important, as positive and negative emotions appear to be independent from each other (Diener and Emmons 1984;Diener et al 1995), and, as such, they are not simply "the opposite ends of a continuum" (Cohen et al 2003, p. 652).…”

Economy, Culture and Happiness: Is There Interconnection?

“…1 Diener, Lucas, & Oishi (2016) (Huppert et al 2009). It has since become one of the four key well-being questions asked by the UK Office for National Statistics (Hicks, Tinkler, & Allin, 2013). 5 Stiglitz, Sen, & Fitoussi (2009, p. 216 12 See, for an example using individual-level data, Kahneman & Deaton (2010), and for national-average data Table 2.1 of Helliwell, Huang, & Wang (2015, p. 22) or Table 2.1 of this chapter.…”

The Office for National Statistics Experience of Collecting and Measuring Subjective Well-Being

“…Additionally, ONS has been trialling a number of different subjective wellbeing questions on the monthly Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (OPN) which is discussed in more detail in section 4 of this article (Hicks, Tinkler and Allin, 2013).…”

“…The report of the Commission for the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (CMEPSP) (CMEPSP, 2009). Subjective well-being can be defined as an approach which allows the individual to decide what is important when making an assessment about how they think and feel about their lives (Hicks, Tinkler, Allin, 2013).…”