2.6 Well-being

Human well-being or welfare is a major area of interest in statistical analysis. This is a broad concept that comprises not only material wealth, such as income and property, but also immaterial assets, such as social relations and security.

It is generally agreed that for the definition of well-being to apply, people should enjoy a reasonably good standard of living; be in reasonably good health; have good social relations; and have a job or something else to keep them meaningfully occupied. Opportunity for movement and personal freedom are also key preconditions for well-being. Education supports the maintenance of a material standard of living, but is also welfare in and of itself.

The building blocks of well-being:

How do we measure well-being?

Statistics on different aspects of well-being are compiled in very different ways. The subjective components of well-being are often quite ad hoc. The concepts and tools used in the measurement of material standard of living, on the other hand, are well established.

The health of the population is often described by reference to mortality, but that is a rather crude measure of this particular aspect of well-being. The occurrence of diseases is described by incidence and prevalence figures, which indicate the number of new (incidence) and existing (prevalence) diseases relative to the population. With chronic illnesses even a low incidence of new cases may lead to a high prevalence of the disease. Health can also be measured on the basis of subjective self-assessments, i.e. by asking people themselves what they think of their health condition.

The most common indicator used in descriptions of educational levelis the number of people with qualifications as a proportion of the adult population. Another way of describing education is to measure the average duration of studies or participation in various types of education, for instance continuing vocational training.

Opportunities for movementsare described by, for example, statistics on tourism.

Regular statistics production on social relations is mainly confined to family statistics. The family population is defined as comprising that part of the population who have a family, i.e. a spouse or children living in the same household-dwelling unit. Among the measures included in family statistics are the proportion of married or cohabiting people in the population, the proportion of those who have married (marriage rate) and the proportion of those who have divorced (divorce rate). Separate surveys have also been conducted on friendships and networks of informal help.

Security has been measured by interviewing people on their personal experiences of being victimised by crime and by studying their fears.

The ultimate aim of human well-being is happiness. Some attempts have even been made to compile statistics on people's happiness. The subject has been tackled in interviews, but in the end it is not at all clear whether happiness can in fact be measured even indirectly.