Mapping the Structure of Community Well‐Being: A Psychometric Network Analysis of Social, Institutional and Environmental Conditions in Nova Scotia

ABSTRACT Well‐being is a multi‐faceted construct, yet most research treats these domains as independent predictors rather than examining how they are organised in relation to one another. Using a large, population‐based dataset from Nova Scotia, Canada ( N = 11,809), this study applied psychometric network analysis to examine the structure of community and systems‐level well‐being across social, health, environmental and socioeconomic conditions. Several variables, including sense of community, life satisfaction, time adequacy, physical health and employment status, occupied highly central positions within the network. Time adequacy also occupied a prominent bridging position, with the highest bridge expected influence under the theoretically‐driven community structure specified and relatively high rankings across alternative community specifications. Thus, perceived time seems connected with multiple areas of everyday life, including work, health, social relationships and wider material conditions. The findings extend previous work by showing that well‐being‐related conditions differ not only in their associations with well‐being outcomes, but also in how they are positioned within a broader structure of interrelated conditions. Overall, the findings support a system‐oriented understanding of well‐being in which individual circumstances and experiences are interconnected with perceptions of wider social and community conditions, while highlighting perceived time as a potentially important part of this structure.