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Well-being is what is ultimately good for a person. It is a central goal of many individual and societal endeavors.Some researchers limit their inquiry to one specific type while others investigate the interrelations between different types. 

Subjective and objective well-being

Subjective well-being is the measure of how people feel about and evaluate their own lives. It encompasses both affective and cognitive components. A person has high affective well-being if they have many pleasant experiences and few unpleasant ones. High cognitive well-being occurs when a person evaluates their life positively, making a global assessment that things are going well. 

Subjective well-being is measured using questionnaires in which individuals report the quality of their experiences. Single-item measures provide the most simple approach, focusing on a single scale, like asking participants to rate how content they are with their lives on a scale from 1 to 10. Multi-item scales include questions for distinct aspects of subjective well-being, with the advantage of reducing the influence of the wording of any single question. They have separate questions for domains such as the presence of positive affects, the absence of negative affects, and overall life satisfaction, which they combine into a comprehensive index. 

Objective well-being encompasses objective factors that a person’s life is going well. Unlike subjective well-being, these factors can be assessed and quantified from an external perspective. They include personal, social, economic, and environmental aspects such as health, education, income, housing, leisure, and security. 

By relying on objective data, measures of objective well-being are less affected by cultural and personal biases influencing self-reports. However, it is not universally accepted that objective well-being is a form of well-being in the strictest sense. This doubt is based on the idea that well-being is essentially a subjective phenomenon tied to a person’s experience. According to this view, objective factors influence and indicate well-being but are not themselves forms of well-being. 

Individual and community well-being

Individual well-being concerns the quality of life of a particular person and is the main focus of disciplines like psychology and philosophy. Community well-being applies the concept of well-being to the state of a group of people. It encompasses a broad range of economic, social, environmental, and cultural aspects that influence how the community functions and thrives while ensuring that the community’s needs are fulfilled. 

One view sees community well-being as the sum of individual well-beings while others emphasize that the relation between the two is more complex. Individual and community well-being often support each other. For instance, high individual well-being can lead a person to contribute more to their community, and a well-functioning community can make its members happy. However, there can also be tensions, like when changes necessary for community well-being conflict with the individual well-being of certain members. 

Closely related to community well-being are categories of well-being defined for specific demographic groups. 

 

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