This article examines three recurring arguments for evaluative subjective well-being (swb) measures: instruments that ask respondents to broadly assess their lives, such as the Cantril Ladder and general life satisfaction questions. To organise the debate and support better dialogue between critics and supporters of these instruments, we draw on two conceptual tools from the philosophy of well-being: the distinction between constitutive and determinative questions, and the characterisation of well-being as a thick concept. The first argument we analyse holds that leaving the object undefined is desirable (a "non-paternalistic" approach). We argue that this stance legitimately declines the constitutive question about well-being, but that in delegating it to respondents it makes engagement with that question a precondition for interpreting the resulting scores. The second argument holds that the absence of a clear definition is not disqualifying, given large samples, respondents' familiarity with the relevant expressions, and the instruments' psychometric properties. We argue that each support admits an alternative explanation grounded in the social rules governing well-being talk, and that no thin, purely descriptive construct lies beneath the everyday expressions these measures rely on. The third argument holds that the measures are useful regardless of these limitations. Here we distinguish an agnostic stance, for which scores are a means of predicting other outcomes, from a score-as-target stance, for which raising the scores is itself the end. The agnostic stance declines constitutive questions successfully, at the price of abandoning well-being as the central object of research; the score-as-target stance cannot, since it must still say why this quantity rather than another deserves to be raised. From these analyses, we propose two practices to bridge critical and applied approaches: making constitutive commitments explicit, and exercising greater rigour in the use of words and expressions.
This meta-synthesis sought to understand employee experiences of digital workplace well-being programmes to inform their future design, implementation, and research. Twenty-nine publications were identified by database searches (Scopus, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, and ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global). Five themes were developed: 'valuable', 'usability', 'shame and stigma', 'contextual factors', and 'inadequate and counterproductive'. Findings reflect the domains of the Technology Acceptance Model, and we suggest ways to enhance engagement in programmes. Given the low quality of existing primary studies, future research should focus on methodological rigour and transparent reporting of methodology.
Wellbeing continues to be a highly contested term. In the context of increasing pressures on educators to teach about wellbeing, this paper revisits and develops our earlier work (O’Brien and O’Shea 2017). It explores rather what it might mean to teach for wellbeing while taking seriously some of its more perplexing challenges. Reflecting on the conceptual complexity and challenges of wellbeing and wellbeing education, it argues for a reframing of these challenges in education to embrace a variety of significant perspectives across disciplines and fields. To this extent it supports a disciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to wellbeing discourse. If wellbeing cuts across ethics, aesthetics, physical and mental health, economics, planetary and species survival, to name a few domains of relevance, it makes sense to employ a wider lens and deeper reflection. While identifying some of the main tensions across the wider discourse of wellbeing, we argue for a philosophical and a social science reframing that can stay attuned to the spatial-temporal conditions of our relational existence (Taylor 2018, Noddings 2012). In illustrating this method, we consider and critique some significant and influential ideas informing and framing psychological and sociological models of wellbeing in education. Subsequent to this analysis of the social scientific contributions, we consider how philosophical inquiry and understandings of meaning-making and subjectivity can address deeper questions of wellbecoming. We challenge the dominant discourse in education that maintains an overly positive account of human nature, one that assumes happiness and wellbeing are unproblematically desirable. We introduce a reflection on suffering and the negative aspects of human life, what we refer to as illbeing, as a necessary concept for thinking about wellbeing. Our findings suggest that it is not sufficient to merely outline the challenge of complexity in teaching about wellbeing but it is also necessary to know how to support students to find their own bearings in this new terrain. To this end we employ a spatial metaphor to address the one sidedness of the subject/object dualisms that characterise so much of the academic wellbeing discourse. It provides a new ethical orientation for students and teachers, a method for finding our bearings in uncertain and sometimes hazardous terrain, and perhaps a point of hope in a crisis of meaning.
The epidemiology of compassion seeks to better understand factors related to the experiences (giving, sharing, and receiving) of compassion. Here, we summarize existing analytic tools from different disciplines allowing analysts to explore local and neighborhood features as a context for better understanding a “geography” of compassion. We provide a brief review of the concepts defining compassion, how these concepts might be measured at local levels of geography, how epidemiology provides a framework for estimating associations between these measures and other local features, and how spatial statistical models adjust for spatial correlations and provide measures of uncertainty associated with estimated associations. We next outline how these tools, taken together, can enable empirical studies of local compassion. We discuss what sorts of epidemiologic questions can be answered, and what compromises analysts will make along the way based on choices of data and analytic methods. We seek to provide a broad framework for such analyses and outline examples illustrating the types of data available and what questions could be answered from each. This framework provides a setting for more detailed creation, description, estimation, and navigation of compassion “landscapes” from the perspectives of giving, sharing, and receiving compassion.
