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What is well-being:
Well-being can be understood as how people feel and how they function,
both on a personal and a social level, and how they evaluate their lives
as a whole. To break this down, how people feel refers to emotions such
as happiness or anxiety. How people function refers to things such as
their sense of competence or their sense of being connected to those
around them. How people evaluate their life as a whole is captured in
their satisfaction with their lives, or how they rate their lives in
comparison with the best possible life.
One can think of someone as having high well-being if they function well,
have positive feelings day-to-day and overall and think their lives are
going well; we call this flourishing. Similarly, you can think of someone
as having low well-being if they do not function well and have negative
feelings day-to-day and overall.
It is worth pointing out that well-being is not exactly the same as
happiness. Happiness often refers to how people are feeling moment-tomoment and does not always tell us about how they evaluate their lives
as a whole (although it can do), or about how they function in the world.
Well-being is a much broader concept than moment-to-moment
happiness: it includes happiness but also other things such as how
satisfied people are with their lives as a whole, and things such as
autonomy (having a sense of control over your life), purpose (having a
sense of purpose in life).
In fact, the field has witnessed the formation of two relatively distinct, yet
overlapping, perspectives and paradigms. The first of these can be
broadly labelled hedonism (Kahneman et al 1999) and reflects the view
of
human
potentials.
This
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The term
the past decade and a half, and much of the research reviewed herein
employs SWB as a major outcome variable.
Things can be still gauged in a different perspective. Here, we look at
three main types of well-being: economic, social and subjective or
personal. Economic well-being refers to the amount of material or
financial resources available for individuals or societies to meet their
needs. Economic well-being is typically measured by the gross domestic
product (GDP) or an individuals disposable income. Social well-being, or
social welfare, refers to the redistribution of economic resources that
occurs with the development of the welfare state, which aims to provide
goods, services or income based on social criteria and not market criteria.
In other words, these resources are obtained or provided below the
market price provided that certain social conditions are met.
While these two conceptions of well-being describe objective realities that
societies control to help individuals achieve their life goals, personal or
subjective well-being refers to the perceptions people have of their
personal situation, not only their satisfaction with the resources they
have, but also regarding other dimensions, such as how they feel about
their goals and achievements.
As we have already seen above, subjective well-being (SWB) has no
single definition; on the contrary, its conceptualization depends on
disciplinary approaches and theories. According to Diener (cited by
Garcia, 2002), there are three main conceptualizations. On the one hand
we can conceive of well-being as satisfaction with ones life, referring to
overall satisfaction with life as well as to an assessment of satisfaction in
different spheres in ones life (income, work, family, etc.). A second
conception of well-being refers to a balance in which positive feelings
outweigh the negative. The third conception is moral or religious in nature
and refers to the attainment of happiness through living life according to