An alternative measure of social wellbeing: analysing the key conceptual and statistical components of quality of life

Abstract

Statisticians, policy makers and social researchers widely accept that there is a need to consider a more nuanced range of measures of quality of life that move beyond the economic domain and that take into account key aspects of an individual's life circumstances. Using data from an Australian household survey, a composite Wellbeing Index was created that covered objective circumstances, with known associations to wellbeing, evaluated from the individual's subjective viewpoint. The robustness of the measure comes from the fact that while covering a broad range of key dimensions, the index only includes the items deemed important components of wellbeing by a majority of respondents. The index was then used to explore the extent to which wellbeing is associated with other dimensions of quality of life that have currency in the contemporary literature. The study contributes to the contemporary debate on social wellbeing and adds new Australian evidence to a body of research that has been mainly based on European and American data.

Covid-19 Estimating the burden of symptomatic disease in the community and the impact of public health measures on physical, mental and social wellbeing: a study protocol

“…Symptoms of depression and anxiety over the past two weeks will be verified with the 16-item Patient Health Questionnaire Anxiety-Depression Scale (PHQ-ADS) ( Kroenke et al , 2016 ). The 12-item Social Wellbeing Index by Boreham et al (2013) will assess participants’ social wellbeing. Questions relating to participants’ health (alcohol and tobacco consumption, health-seeking patterns) will also be included, in addition to wider socio-demographic questions (age, gender, region, social class, employment status, highest level of education).…”

“…Whether the respondent or other members of the household are currently unwell or have been unwell during the preceding two weeks with one or more sensitive symptoms for Covid-19 infection will also be queried (see Appendix 1, Extended data for Survey 1 Questions (Troya, 2020)). Furthermore, individuals answering The 12-item Social Wellbeing Index by Boreham et al (2013) will assess participants' social wellbeing. Questions relating to participants' health (alcohol and tobacco consumption, health-seeking patterns) will also be included, in addition to wider socio-demographic questions (age, gender, region, social class, employment status, highest level of education).…”

Do Current Measures of Social Exclusion Depict the Multidimensional Challenges of Marginalized Urban Areas? Insights, Gaps and Future Research

“…Although there were two studies that referred to the measurement of social exclusion in the European Union (EU) [3,6], most of the contributions were made at the national level. The studies were carried out mainly in countries in Europe, except for some conducted in countries such as Australia [15,38,39,44], the United States (US) [37] and Mexico [45]. Notably, all of the countries were members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and considered to be highly developed according to the United Nations.…”

Spatial variations in contributors to life satisfaction: An Australian case study

“…A standard ordinary least squares regression (OLS) analyses the relationship between variables with the assumption that the relationship is uniform over the entire study area. For example, the relationship between life satisfaction and objective variables has been analysed in Australia, determining a single average correlation for the entire country (Boreham et al 2013;Ambrey and Fleming 2014b;Kubiszewski et al 2018;Kubiszewski et al 2019). Such analyses, although important, ignore regional heterogeneity.…”