Abstract
We report on a trial of the neighbourhood thriving framework (NTF), a conceptual framework from psychology and social science for measuring collective subjective social well-being. It combines the notions of feeling good and functioning effectively in a neighbourhood social environment in an indicator set of 15 conceptual dimensions. An online questionnaire was used to measure neighbourhood thriving (NT) among 212 pro-social volunteers involved in revitalising neighbourhoods in the UK city of Stoke-on-Trent between May and October 2018. Exploratory factor analysis revealed 11 factors that made conceptual sense including three social epidemiological pathways to well-being, networks, participation and pro-social behaviours, and four criteria for flourishing societies, autonomous citizenship, safety, cohesive communities and resilience. The 11 sub-scales of NT showed satisfactory internal consistency reliability and preliminary evidence of construct validity. The sub-scales were used tentatively to examine NT among the volunteer sample, which showed the highest sub-scale score for Positive Regard and the lowest score for Celebration. Different levels of NT were observed among the community, with age and income positively associated with higher levels of NT. Further validation work is needed before the NT scales can be used with confidence. Validated scales offer potential benefits including: measuring NT pre- and -post project implementation; establishing which dimensions of NT are, and are not, working well in a community and need strengthening through further initiatives, and establishing which specific groups of people are experiencing lower levels of NT and designing projects that meet their needs.
Highlights
We report on a trial of a conceptual framework measuring social well-being called the ‘neighbourhood thriving framework’ (originally outlined under the name ‘neighbourhood flourishing framework’ in an earlier paper by authors Anderson and Baldwin (2017) in the English city of Stoke-on-Trent
Over one-third of the sample participated in the MCM, while 50% were involved in projects other than MCM and 1000 lives (Table 2)
More validation work is needed on these scales, with non pro-social volunteers, before they can be used with confidence to measure the 11 dimensions identified in the study
Summary
Neighbourhood FlourishingWe report on a trial of a conceptual framework measuring social well-being called the ‘neighbourhood thriving framework’ (originally outlined under the name ‘neighbourhood flourishing framework’ in an earlier paper by authors Anderson and Baldwin (2017) in the English city of Stoke-on-Trent. The neighbourhood thriving framework is based on an original framework called the ‘neighbourhood flourishing framework’ (NFF) that was designed to measure the effects of urban design on neighbourhood flourishing (NF). It emphasised a place-based conceptualisation of ‘neighbourhood’ in daily life. In using our adapted version of the NFF (known here as the neighbourhood thriving framework for differential purposes) to collect data from pro-social volunteers, we sought to perform exploratory factor analysis, a statistical analysis technique, on the data to see to what extent the resulting factor structure reflected these three pathways
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