The year in wellbeing: reflecting on 2021

This year, the Centre has conducted a variety of evidence projects including mapping evidence bases and starting several research projects.

One such milestone was the launch of our work on measuring children and young people’s subjective wellbeing. We worked with The Children’s Society, and with support from The Health Foundation, to map out and understand what measures and tools are being used in the UK. This has enabled us to recommend good and consistent practices to help schools, colleges, universities and other settings measure the wellbeing of the children in their care.

Our Dying Well project, led by Clair Fisher, looked at what matters to people living with terminal illness and how society can support their wellbeing. It made the case for putting wellbeing at the heart of palliative care by bringing together expert knowledge and lived experience to highlight research and evidence gaps.

“Let’s rethink end of life care by using wellbeing evidence to inform and improve services. I’d love to see more focus given to living well, designing in wellbeing and properly holistic person-centred care.”

– Clair Fisher, project lead on Dying Well

Along with many other organisations, through 2021 we have continued to re-focus some of our work to understand the effects of the pandemic. Some of our Covid-specific achievements in evidence include:

We built Covid:WIRED, an interactive wellbeing inequalities dashboard containing Covid-related studies on the impacts of the pandemic across categories such as gender, race and ethnicity, ill health and relationships. Covid:WIRED was created in collaboration with the Centre for Thriving Places to consolidate and democratise what we know in the wider research and policy communities about the effects of the pandemic.

Through 2021, the dashboard revealed important findings which we published in three briefings. The focus of these were:

• Subjective wellbeing
• Housing
• Income and employment

We also published the final of three major analysis projects with UCL to better understand the pandemic’s impact: What helped people to cope with Covid-19 and lockdowns? All three briefings can be found here.

Further work that continued this year include three Secondary Data Analysis Initiatives (SDAIs) with outputs to be published in 2022. These are: 

• Loneliness across the lifecourse: this work looks to understand the role of social isolation and loneliness in wellbeing across the lifecourse. It is led by Dr. Praveetha Patalay (UCL).
• Loneliness in adolescents: encompassing four studies, the project focuses on loneliness and wellbeing among adolescents and young people through the lens of risk and protective factor, geographical differences, links between loneliness, mental health and wellbeing, and Covid trajectories. It is led by Dr. Emily Long (University of Glasgow). 

Social prescribing; the aim of this work is to transform our understanding of the relationship between community engagement and wellbeing at a population level.  It is led by Dr Daisy Fancourt (UCL Behavioural Science and Health), Dr Karen Mak (UCL BSH) and Dr Marie Polley (Social Prescribing Network) with the Centre.

In early 2021, the Campaign to End Loneliness joined the Centre as a partner, strengthening our commitment to developing robust evidence around social isolation and identifying what works to reduce loneliness for individuals and within communities.

The Centre contributed to new supplementary guidance to HM Treasury’s Green Book Valuation of Wellbeing which was published in July. The guidance means wellbeing data and evidence can be used consistently across government departments in spending review proposals.

“The appraisal of social value, also known as public value, is based on the principles and ideas of welfare economics and concerns overall social welfare efficiency, not simply economic market efficiency. Social or public value therefore includes all significant costs and benefits that affect the welfare and wellbeing of the population, not just market effects. For example, environmental, cultural, health, social care, justice and security effects are included. This welfare and wellbeing consideration applies to the entire population that is served by the government, not simply taxpayers.”

– HMT Green Book

We published a briefing on what matters for our sense of purpose in the UK, the first ever analysis of a country’s data of this kind. We also published three fact sheets outlining interventions that aim to improve those measures in our ONS4 interventions review:

• Wellbeing and gender
• Wellbeing and employment
• Wellbeing and age

Adding to our Measuring Wellbeing series, Professor Sarah Stewart-Brown’s paper titled Insights and Reflections on the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scales (WEMWBS) was launched in the autumn. The paper looks back at 15 years of WEMWBS, uses of the scales and opportunities for the future.

Another published paper from this year includes Quality in Qual, a discussion paper by Ruth Puttick and Jonathan Breckon which explores how to do the best qualitative study for projects.

The workplace wellbeing questionnaire methodology continues to be one of our most popular resources, highlighting a huge interest in wellbeing and working life. As a key area for us, our Business Leaders’ Council further focuses on improving wellbeing in the workplace and has held regular webinars on topics including supporting employee mental health and why financial wellbeing matters at work.

Our Maximising Local Area Wellbeing programme is working with ten local authorities to explore how to implement wellbeing interventions across different areas of focus and in line with local needs. The work is due to complete in 2022.

“Being part of this cohort has also helped us to put a ‘wellbeing lens’ up against other projects so that wellbeing is now firmly a goal within all of our work.”

– Shirley Goodhew, Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council

We published the Understanding Thriving Communities report which looks at what the evidence tells us about factors and interventions that influence a community’s capacity to thrive, including insight into where there are gaps in the evidence. The project also included a briefing which shows how community assets contribute to the conditions that enable people and communities to thrive.