Being Well Together: Individual Subjective and Community Wellbeing

This paper reviews how community wellbeing is defined and measured in relation to individual subjective wellbeing, the assumptions underlying the dominant approaches and what gets left out. An important distinction in approaches to community wellbeing concerns the primary purpose. The focus may be on community only in so far as community scale characteristics impact individual subjective wellbeing, or there may be a focus on community scale aspects of living together in which community wellbeing is more than the sum of the individual parts. Most existing frameworks for assessment of community wellbeing are premised on the centrality of an autonomous and independently acting or feeling individual and the primary interest is on how community aspects of life impact on individual wellbeing. Areas of life typically assessed notably omit attention to inequalities, intangible culture, settings and scale, sustainability and inter-generationality. However, social theory offers alternative understandings of individual experience as primarily relational which aligns with an interest in community and demands different ways of thinking about wellbeing and wellbeing assessments. Capturing subjective aspects of local life that are not simply individual but reflect the ways in which people feel and are well together is more challenging. Alternative forms of data collection are needed through deliberative processes or the analysis of narrative and other local culturally shared resources.