Personal wellbeing, also called individual wellbeing and personal flourishing (amongst many other terms), examines a person’s quality of life by identifying the extent to which they are feeling satisfied with their life or different aspects of it, happy with life, or finding meaning and purpose in life. Personal wellbeing is affected by all of the indicators and domains examined in the Hub – it can be thought of as being the product of the many factors that are affecting a person’s wellbeing at a given point in time.

Importantly, personal wellbeing is about more than health. Read more about this here.

Personal wellbeing provides insight into the wellbeing of the individual person. When measured across a community, it is possible to identify how many people are experiencing low, moderate and high levels of personal wellbeing, and whether some are at greater risk of low wellbeing than others. Large numbers of studies have now confirmed that consistently low rating of personal wellbeing, using multiple measures, is associated with a range of negative objective life outcomes, such as shorter life expectancy, lower standard of living, and experience of traumatic and stressful events.

Measuring personal wellbeing does not, however, provide insight into community wellbeing, which examines how well a community is functioning to support the wellbeing of the people living in it, and how fairly and equitably it is providing these opportunities.

Advantages: Subjective measures of personal wellbeing provide insight into how people in a community are feeling about their lives, and are useful predictors of a range of life outcomes. They help identify whether pressures and stresses that are being experienced in a community are leading to a change in overall quality of life.

Disadvantages: This measure focuses on wellbeing as experienced by the person. It is possible for this to be affected by what people observe around them – if many others have a very high standard of living in the community, and they don’t, a person may rate their wellbeing lower than they would if they were living in a community where most people had the same standard of living they do. This concept is often referred to as the hedonic treadmill, where every improvement in things like standard of living is readily adapted to, and our wellbeing resets to match new expectations about what should be present in your life. However, despite this challenge, measures of personal wellbeing also tend to differ in expected ways between regions experiencing differing types of opportunities and challenges.

There is widespread debate about how best to measure personal wellbeing. Some argue that personal wellbeing should be measured by asking a single item in a survey, such as asking a person to rate their satisfaction with their life overall. Others argue that this doesn’t provide sufficient insight, and that personal wellbeing measures should ask questions about multiple aspects of a person’s life, and use the average of their responses as the measure of overall wellbeing. There is also debate about whether it is best to ask a person about their happiness, satisfaction with aspects of life, or sense of meaning and purpose in life. Happiness and enjoyment measures are called ‘hedonic’ measures of wellbeing, as they focus on how pleasurable a person is finding their life. Meaning and purpose measures are called ‘eudaimonic’ measures. Satisfaction measures are often referred to as life evaluation measures.

All of these approaches have validity and are used in some studies. In the measures section below, measures that used to regularly collect data in Australian surveys are examined. In addition to these there are many other measures of personal wellbeing you can use.