Well-being measures to be included in major European survey

nef is on the road to producing a second set of its National Accounts of Well-being, as part of a successful bid to design a 50-item module of well-being questions on a prestigious European survey.

The original National Accounts of Well-being, published in January 2009, produced headline measures of personal and social well-being for 22 countries across Europe. The indicators and their constituent elements were made available for full interactive exploration on www.nationalaccountsofwellbeing.org. The results showed that Denmark, Switzerland and Norway had the highest levels of overall well-being, with the UK ranked 13^th out of 22 on personal well-being and 15^th on social well-being.

The data behind these results came from a specially designed module on the third round of the European Social Survey (ESS), a major survey of over 40,000 people across Europe. The module was designed by a cross-national team of experts from across Europe, led by Professor Felicia Huppert of the University of Cambridge and including the Founder of the centre for well-being at nef, Nic Marks. Together with two other members of the original team, Professor Johannes Siegrist of the University of Dusseldorf and Professor Joar Vittersø of the University of Tromsø, and new member Professor Carmelo Vázquez of Complutense University of Madrid, they have now won the opportunity to design a repeat of the well-being module to be included in the sixth round of the ESS.

The new well-being module will repeat many of the original questions, which will allow ground-breaking analysis of detailed changes in well-being over time between participating European countries. In addition, the successful bid outlines the team’s intention to explore a number of new questions, including further measures of engagement, social well-being, and participation in activities described by nef’s evidence-based Five Ways to Well-being.

“We are delighted that the European Social Survey has decided to re-include a comprehensive set of questions on well-being,” said Juliet Michaelson, a researcher at nef’s Centre for Well-being and one of the creators of National Accounts for Well-being. “At a time when a range of factors, both environmental and socio-economic, indicate that the relentless pursuit of economic growth is neither desirable nor possible, we urgently need to develop alternative measures of progress, to avoid the problems created by a myopic focus on GDP. Getting comprehensive data on personal and social well-being on the international scale of the ESS is crucial if policy-makers are to work towards what really matters in people’s lives.”