The work also looked at how this relationship differs for different locations and individuals, and sought to answer the research question: What are the relationships between community wellbeing and the wellbeing of different individuals and identified groups within that community?
As part of the project, the team mapped mechanisms that link community and individual wellbeing, and inequalities, together. The result is the Model of Individual and Community Wellbeing.
The team leading the research are Laura Kudrna, Oyinlola Oyebode, Sarah Atkinson and Sarah Stewart-Brown. In this video, Laura presents the model, who and what it’s for, and how it might help organisations with their work – bridging the research with practical use:
Perhaps this approach to individual and community wellbeing will be useful to you, especially if you are thinking about evaluating the effectiveness of community initiatives, and its impact on different but related levels of individual and community wellbeing.
While focusing on community wellbeing can help us understand the differences between places, understanding individual wellbeing can bring focus to the different experiences of people within the same place, helping us to better understand the drivers of inequality and disadvantage. Unpacking how individual wellbeing and community wellbeing may be related and how changes in one may lead to changes in the other was at the heart of this project.
The model shows some of the pathways through which different interventions and initiatives might impact individual and community wellbeing. It can be complex to change wellbeing and so the model does not seek to explain everything. Instead, the purpose of the model is to inform work in this area by providing more clarity about the relationships between individual and community wellbeing.
Individual wellbeing
Feeling good and functioning well. Affected by internal and external factors such as the physical and social context of the place where we live and personal relationships.
Community wellbeing
This is how we are doing as a community. It is about how a group of people are doing as a group and goes beyond just adding up the individual wellbeing of the people in that group, to include considerations of how wellbeing is distributed. In this study we defined community wellbeing by thinking about subjective and objective aspects of wellbeing that are of interest at the community level as opposed to at the individual, national or
international levels.
National wellbeing
How we’re doing as individuals, communities and as a nation, and how sustainable that
is for the future.
On the top there are three components of community wellbeing, which are community-level objective factors, subjective ‘links’ or mechanisms, and subjective wellbeing. Communities may be groups like local areas and communities (such as workplaces, schools, or communities of identity, such as religion and sexuality), although the text in this model is about local areas, and it could be modified to be about another community.
On the bottom there are the three components of individual wellbeing, which refer to people within these communities: individual level objective factors, subjective psychological ‘links’ or mechanisms, and subjective wellbeing.
The model could be arranged differently, in terms of what is on the left and what is on the right, because there are bidirectional relationships between these concepts, represented by bidirectional arrows. More arrows could be added too, depending on the relationships proposed for a particular context.
Currently, the model is arranged from the perspective of decision-makers who have access to levers that allow them to alter the objective community factors shown on the upper left. Sometimes objective community factors are perceived as more fluid and easier to change, such as the provision of benches in the local area or housing availability. Sometimes they are seen as more fixed and relatively harder to change, such as whether a community is in an urban or rural location and wider political factors.
On the right are subjective reports of wellbeing. For individuals, these could be thoughts about life overall or their day-to-day feelings. At the community level, these could be thoughts about the community, feelings when in the community, or inequalities in subjective wellbeing. In the middle, linking the objective factors to wellbeing experiences, are subjective ‘links’ or mechanisms. These are the processes by which changes on the left-hand side might convert into wellbeing on the right hand side. Mechanisms might be at the individual level, such as if an individual has high self-esteem, or at the community level, such as individual perceptions that local facilities like shops and parks are satisfactory, or the proportion of people in an area that perceive the area positively.
The difference between the subjective mechanisms and subjective wellbeing is that the mechanisms are about how people think and feel about certain aspects of their lives or their communities (e.g. their sense of belonging to the local area, their relationships with others or how easily they can access local services) whereas subjective wellbeing is more purely about thoughts and feelings irrespective of these specific aspects (an evaluation of whether it’s a good place to live, day-to-day feelings about the place, an evaluation of how their life is going, how happy they feel right now).
As an example of a pathway cutting through some of the model, local-level income inequality (a fluid community objective factor) could be associated with someone feeling sad (individual subjective wellbeing) because people feel like they don’t belong to their local area (a subjective community mechanism). However, subjective wellbeing can drive community or individual objective factors – happier people might be more likely to volunteer, for example (Hansen, Aartsen, Slagsvold and Deindl, 2018). And the individual and community boxes are related: communities experiencing positive feelings about their area (top right) are likely to have individuals within them who are happier (bottom right), as has been shown for workplace communities (Whitman, Van Rooy and Viswesvaran, 2010).
In addition, the same fluid community intervention on the left, such as a park, may affect people with different fixed individual factors differently, such as people with mobility impairments who may be unable to use the park if it is not designed to be accessible.
You may also wish to read the blog article on this document.
You may also wish to read the blog article on this document.
[gravityform id=1 title=true description=true ajax=true tabindex=49]
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Please find out more on our privacy policy page
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!
