Structure of Well-Being: An Exploratory Study of the Distinction Between Individual Well-Being and Community Well-Being and the Importance of Intersubjective Community Well-Being

Abstract

Despite the popularity of well-being in public policy discourses, the meaning of well-being and how to use it in a public policy context is still unclear. In this chapter, we present a comprehensive framework of well-being that clarifies its meaning by distinguishing different types and aspects of well-being. First, we distinguish individual well-being and community well-being. Since public policy concerns public resources, we further explore the aspects of community well-being. Previous works only identified objective and subjective aspects of community well-being, leading to confusion in the measurement process regarding aggregation from individuals to the community. To address this issue, we identify a third aspect called intersubjective community well-being measured by evaluative questions. Using survey data from six districts in Seoul, South Korea, we show that individual well-being and community well-being can be distinguished empirically and that the relationship between intersubjective and objective community well-being is stronger than the relationship between subjective and objective community well-being. This suggests that policymakers can gain better insight for policymaking by paying more attention to intersubjective community well-being, which effectively bridges relevant objective measures to collective evaluation of citizens.