Enhancing wellbeing: The necessity and implications of a culturally-grounded interdisciplinary conceptualisation

Abstract

Psychologists, in recent years, have been leading the way in conceptualising and assessing young people’s wellbeing. In the UK, the highly influential annual Good Childhood report in particular has done much to establish which aspects of their lives that young people consider to be important for their wellbeing and identify areas of concern. Governments worldwide are taking notice of wellbeing supporting national and international assessment programmes. However, conceptually the field needs clarity and the contributions of different disciplinary perspectives still need to be fully realised, with even the key distinction between hedonic (feeling well) and eudaimonic (functioning well) aspects of wellbeing made by positive psychologists not being fully recognised in measurement programmes. If young people’s wellbeing in education is to be enhanced, I will argue in this paper that first of all we need to conceptualise it more clearly and drawing on my own research from the UK and Kazakhstan, as well as other work, that this needs to be done with consideration to interdisciplinary and culturally-grounded perspectives.