There is near-universal agreement that promotion of individual well-being, at least in the long run, is one of the legitimate goals - perhaps the most important goal - of the modern state. (...) In short, promotion of individual well-being is a worldwide phenomenon.
With the growing recognition of actual and incipient global shortages of food and other critical resources, the hopes of the 1960's are being tempered by a new sense of the limits to growth imposed by the size and nature of our planet. In the mid-1970's issues concerning the maintenance and re-distribution of individual well-being may well become of as great concern as the promotion of increased well-being. However, whether the focus is on enhancement, maintenance, or redistribution, the basic concern is with the well-being of individuals.
Well-being is broadly conceived to mean the 'level' of life quality - i.e., the extent to which pleasure and satisfaction characterize human existence and the extent to which people can avoid the various miseries which are potentially the lot of each of us.
Relatively little is scientifically known about such broadly conceived well-being - either in the makeup of its constituent parts, or in the conditions and influences which tend to bring it about. This is not to say, however, that people have not been concerned about the topic. Legions of philosophers and poets and religious leaders and revolutionaries, over several thousand years, have offered their insights on how to achieve the 'good life'. However, the tools of modern social science -rigorous conceptualization, valid measurement, broadly representative data, and sophisticated analysis - have only recently begun to be adequate to permit exploration of individual well-being.
We would submit that the worldwide movement toward the development, monitoring, and increased use of social indicators is evidence of a desire to measure, understand, and influence individual well-being. The current movement to collect and collate an increasingly broad range of social indicators, a movement underway in most of the more developed countries, some of the developing countries, and in several international organizations, represents an exciting attempt to begin applying the insights and methods of science to this age-old human concern.
Social indicators currently being developed can be classified into two broad types, sometimes referred to as 'objective' and 'subjective'. In general, the former consist of counts of various types of phenomena, whereas the latter are based on people's perceptions and feelings.
To date, most efforts at developing social indicators have focused on the 'objective' indicators. One purpose of this paper is to suggest that the 'objective' measures are only indirect measures of individual well-being and that more direct perceptual measures also need to be developed, measured, monitored over time, analysed, and interpreted. We suggest that these measures provide a vitally important complement to the 'objective' measures which are currently receiving what may be a disproportionate share of time, energy, and attention.
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Diener, E. (1984). Subjective well-being. Psychological Bulletin, 95(3), 542–575.
Throughout history philosophers considered happiness to be the highest good and ultimate motivation for human action. (...)
The literature on SWB is concerned with how and why people experience their lives in positive ways, including both cognitive judgments and affective reactions. As such, it covers studies that have used such diverse terms as happiness, satisfaction, morale, and positive affect. Wilson's (1967) review of this emergent area contained two broad conclusions. First, Wilson wrote that those with the most advantages were happiest. He concluded that the "happy person emerges as a young, healthy, well-educated, well-paid, extroverted, optimistic, worry-free, religious, married person with high self-esteem, high job morale, modest aspirations, of either sex and of a wide range of intelligence" (p.294).
Over 700 studies have been published since Wilson's review. Are his conclusions still valid? In the first section of this article, recent work on measuring and conceptualizing SWB is reviewed. However, the majority of the emerging literature has examined demographic and other external correlates of SWB. Several of Wilson's conclusions are called into question by these findings. For example, as is discussed in upcoming sections, later research did not indicate a substantial correlation between health and happiness or between age and happiness. More importantly, the variance accounted for by the demographic factors is not large. This has led to an increasing number of studies on psychological causes of happiness. An overview of the large literature on the correlates of SWB is given in the second major section of this review.
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