What Constitutes Well-being? Five Views Among Adult People from the Netherlands on what is Important for a Good Life

Abstract

Well-being has gained interest as object of study in the social sciences and as an outcome measure for policy evaluation. However, little agreement exists with respect to the substantive meaning of well-being, the dimensions of well-being that should be considered in a multi-dimensional approach, and the variety of well-being conceptions people have for their own lives. This study explored conceptions of “a good life for you” among 1,477 adult people from the Netherlands by means of Q-methodology, based on a theoretical framework synthesizing the main theories of well-being. We find five distinct views on what people consider to be a good life for themselves: “Health and feeling well”, “Hearth and home”, “Freedom and autonomy”, “Social relations and purpose” and “Individualism and independence”. While there is strong agreement with respect to the importance of feeling both physically and mentally well, the views diverge considerably regarding aspects such as social relations, autonomy, spirituality, and material welfare. Associations between viewpoints and respondent characteristics had face validity. The findings of this study have significant implications for the development of measures of well-being and policies aimed to improve population well-being. Further research is required into the prevalence of these views on well-being in the population, their relation to respondent characteristics and into differences in views over time and between countries with different socio-economic, political and cultural environments.

Development and Content Validation of the 10-item Well-being Instrument (WiX) for use in Economic Evaluation Studies

“…This information was summarized in a large table (not reported here because of its size). Next, in the fourth step, two authors (A1, A5) cross-tabulated the domains and items of these eight instruments against the domains of a theoretical framework outlined by van der Deijl et al (van der Deijl et al, 2023) that synthesized the main existing theories of well-being. This framework distinguished 11 domains of well-being, namely: physical health; safety; recreation and leisure; mental well-being; political representation; mental development; environmental conditions; social relations; material well-being; labour conditions; and achievements (see Table S1 in online Supplementary Information 1).…”

“…Their feedback was discussed and implemented in a joint meeting with the whole research team. We agreed that the domain political representation would be excluded from the new instrument, because it was not represented in any of the selected instruments and was also not considered an important constituent of well-being among the adult population of the Netherlands (van der Deijl et al, 2023). This decision was, however, flagged as an item to be verified with experts and members of the public in the content validation phase.…”

“…In the eighth step, to evaluate the comprehensiveness of the draft instrument, two authors (A1, A5) compared the ten domains and the corresponding items of the WiX to the findings of a study into what constitutes a good life for adults in the Netherlands and identified five views on well-being, namely: Health and feeling well; Hearth and home; Freedom and autonomy; Social relations and purpose; and Individualism and independence (van der Deijl et al, 2023). 3 By inspecting the characterizing and distinguishing aspects for these five views, we determined that no important items that adult citizens in the Netherlands identified as important for their well-being were missing from the draft instrument.…”

“…Although the capability approach has been praised for offering a broad conceptual framework to the assessment of quality of life, it does not specify a (core) set of capabilities or functionings that have value to people and could be used for the operationalisation of the approach in practice. Moreover, the approach is unclear about how any chosen set of capabilities or functionings can be valued, aggregated and traded-off for assessments of overall well-being (Binder, 2014;Hasan, 2019;van der Deijl et al, 2023). Subjective well-being (defined here as enduring satisfaction with life-as-a-whole, or happiness (Veenhoven, 2012)) offers an alternative framework in which assessments of well-being are grounded in peoples' individual judgements of their life situation, which include -but is not confined to-their capabilities and functionings.…”

“…To relate the conceptualisation of the WiX to the capability approach, satisfaction with life can be seen as fulfilment (with the achievement) of a set of happiness-relevant functionings (Binder, 2014;Sen, 1985). 1 The development of the WiX was theory driven, building systematically on several theories of well-being and explorative empirical work (van der Deijl et al, 2023) as well as existing generic instruments to ensure its comprehensiveness. In addition, the conceptualisation of the WiX as a multiitem instrument follows the notion of pragmatic subjectivism (Haybron & Tiberius, 2015), which states that confining measurement to a limited set of indicators is legitimate for policy evaluation if the indicators are based on personal well-being values, that is, what citizens consider important for their well-being (see also Alexandrova, 2016;van Exel, 2017).…”