An idiographic Approach to Measuring Subjective Well-Being

Abstract While aggregate, national measures of wellbeing may be useful for developing national policies and making international comparisons, they are less helpful when it comes to the more prosaic matter of developing policies at the project or programme level. This is because wellbeing is multi-dimensional and variable in terms of the relative importance of domains, the attributes and indicators used to evaluate domains, and the relative importance of those attributes and indicators. Consequently, people’s preferences regarding the trade-offs that must be made between domains, and between attributes within domains, are exceptionally diverse. We use an idiographic approach, Judgement Analysis, to quantify people’s preferences regarding trade-offs within, and between, well-being domains using green space, water quality, cultural identity, social connectedness. We show that Judgement Analysis has the potential at the programme or project scale to usefully quantify differences in the relative importance people place on well-being domains and to quantifying differences in the relative importance of the cues they use to evaluate well-being with respect to a domain. Our results make explicit the extensive diversity in people’s perspectives on well-being that is often hidden in the popular nomothetic approaches to measuring well-being.