The Role of Subjective Well-Being as an Organizing Concept for Community Indicators

Abstract

One important objective of community indicator initiatives, often explicit in their title or mandate, is to assess overall well-being, life quality, or social progress. These concepts are increasingly becoming accountable to the evaluation survey respondents give when asked about how their life feels, overall. Such quantitative, subjective data are not directly useful for guiding policy, but statistical analysis based on these subjective well-being data can now be used to guide the choice of indicators in a community indicator system, and can even provide weights to use in calculating a summary index for a set of seemingly unrelated indicator measures. This chapter uses a database of 82 indicator initiatives implemented since the 1970s from 30 countries, and at all geographic scales, to assess trends in the structure, content, and success of attempts to measure human flourishing or life quality. Based on a taxonomy that encompasses unaggregated dashboards of indicators, money-denominated accounts, other indices (composite indicators), and measures oriented around subjective well-being, the database suggests that unaggregated and subjective-well-being-oriented indicator initiatives are more successful in terms of their longevity. Moreover, in the interest of accessibility, transparency, accountability, and the assurance of relevance, the construction of indices should only be carried out when quantitatively guided by the analysis of subjective well-being data. Relying on subjective well-being in this way provides an intuitive, compelling headline indicator or synthetic index, supported by a set of policy-amenable indicators whose inclusion is accountable to the actual experience of citizens.