Research on Well-being: Measuring “Good Life”, Shifting Values, and Cross-cultural Applicability

Abstract

The concept of well-being has evolved over the several decades as research continued to reveal its multidimensional, dynamic, person-specific, and culture-specific nature, including most recently, the ecological embeddedness of well-being. Well-being encompasses how well people live with regard to people’s physical, social, and mental conditions, the fulfillment of their basic needs and capabilities, and the opportunities and resources to which they have access. Scholars use well-being research to understand why some humans thrive, while others do not. Dissatisfaction with the skewed decision-making solely based on the Gross National Product/Gross Domestic Product by many stakeholders has triggered scientists to develop well-being indicators. Scholars and practitioners still disagree about how to best measure well-being due to its complexity (or comprehensiveness), accessibility, and communicability. There is no single indicator set that will be able to capture all relevant aspects of individual and societal. However, policymakers and scientists need measures that can be used effectively in communication and research to provide relevant information to citizens and politicians. One of the first attempt to move away from the economic indicator is the Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI), which rank countries by changes that occurred in real-life conditions such as the distribution of social benefits between the sexes, among ethnic groups, and by region and sector. The PQLI facilitates international and regional comparisons by minimizing developmental and cultural ethnocentricities . The concept of PQLI, with correction on the overlap between infant mortality and life expectancy, was later adopted and improved