We’ve put together a glossary of important or unfamiliar words. You can find them all here, and they will be highlighted where they appear in the guide. Hover over or click on them to find the definition.
This section provides an overview of the different approaches to wellbeing measurement. It helps you think through some of the key issues when designing a before-and-after survey and gives you a sense of what you can and can’t say with the data you’ve collected.
Wellbeing can be measured using both subjective and objective measures. Using both types of measure can help you build a more accurate overall picture of your wellbeing outcomes and of what’s really important to how people feel and function.
What does a good wellbeing measure look like?
These examine the observable factors that affect someone’s life, for example, whether they have a job or whether they have stable housing. Objective indicators attempt to measure a person’s quality of life using measures of education, employment, health, housing, income and environmental quality, among other factors that affect how they feel and function. You can read more about this in the section What is wellbeing? in this guide.
You’re probably already collecting data on objective measures. What you collect depends on what you want to achieve. For example, if you:
Objective measures are useful, but because they look at someone’s life from the outside, they only tell you part of the story. If you want to measure overall wellbeing, you need to ask them directly how they feel about their lives – their subjective wellbeing.
In this guide we will focus on the subjective measurement of wellbeing.
These ask people directly how they’re doing. Individuals themselves decide what makes a difference to them about:
Subjective wellbeing is referred to as ‘personal wellbeing’ by the Office for National Statistics and is measured using questions that provide a general impression of how someone is feeling. These are sometimes known as global measures .
These measures look at:
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) measures subjective wellbeing across the UK, to assess these aspects of overall wellbeing.
ONS4 – the national measures for subjective wellbeing in the UK
Next I would like to ask you four questions about your feelings on aspects of your life. There are no right or wrong answers. For each of these questions I’d like you to give an answer on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is ‘not at all’ and 10 is ‘completely’.
| Measure | Question |
|---|---|
| Life satisfaction | Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays? |
| Worthwhile | Overall, to what extent do you feel that the things that you do in your life are worthwhile? |
| Happiness | Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday? |
| Anxiety | On a scale where 0 is ‘not at all anxious’ and 10 is ‘completely anxious’, how anxious did you feel yesterday overall? |
These and other global measures of wellbeing are included in the Wellbeing Measures Bank in this guide.
Objective and subjective measures can be domain-specific – they can relate to those aspects of life that are most likely to be impacted by a project or programme or to be barriers or enablers of overall wellbeing.
Some examples of domain-specific subjective measures are:
You may want to use some of these measures to understand how and why wellbeing changes as a result of your activity, and to improve your Theory of Change. For more on Theories of Change, you can read the section on Planning your wellbeing evaluation in this guide.
Wellbeing measures can also be split by the timescale they aim to represent. Measures such as the ONS4 are included in longer-term panel data surveys and capture ongoing differences in wellbeing. These help us see trends and changes in wellbeing over longer periods of time.
Other measures are more short-term and use ‘in-the-moment’ data, such as the ‘ mappiness’ application , which records wellbeing scores via a mobile phone. These are useful for linking emotions to very specific conditions, such as whether someone feels better after exercise, or how commuting affects their mood.
Collecting demographic and socio-economic data from your participants – such as gender, ethnicity and self-reported health – will help you build a more accurate picture of their wellbeing. By using questions such as these you can capture the variations in wellbeing among participants of similar groups or backgrounds. You can do this:
If you’re looking to do Contribution analysis , you’ll want to know what else is going on in someone’s life, including any actions of individuals or organisations that may be affecting an individual’s wellbeing. You’ll want to ask beneficiaries which other activities and services they are accessing and how frequently. This will help you estimate the role of factors other than your organisation in generating any wellbeing changes you may record.
You should already be familiar with the general ethical considerations of evaluating your activities, and any wellbeing evaluation should fit with your established approaches and safeguarding policies.
Yet, there are some aspects of wellbeing evaluation which may require additional thinking to make sure your approach is ethical and sensitive.
The most obvious consideration is in the nature of subjective wellbeing questions themselves. Asking someone very personal questions about their lives – such as whether they feel happy, or lonely, or whether what they do in life is worthwhile – is very different from asking them how often they visit a museum, or go to the gym.
The research shows that most people think studying wellbeing is important, but some people may feel uncomfortable or distressed by the questions in your survey.
Here’s a practical guide from Oxfam for thinking about ethical issues in your evaluation.
One of the main ways you’ll be collecting wellbeing data is through a survey, which will involve the development of a questionnaire and the collection and analysis of responses.
In a before and After comparative survey , you will ask your participants to complete the same questionnaire at baseline – at or very near the beginning of their participation in your project or programme – and at endline – after your project has ended. This will allow you to measure changes in wellbeing at the end of your project, compared to your beneficiaries’ starting point.
You can also follow up with the same questionnaire three, six or 12 months after the end of your project or programme. Conducting follow-up questionnaires will help you estimate how long changes in wellbeing last. For example, if you record wellbeing improvements among beneficiaries 12 months after your programme has ended, you can claim that programme’s effects last for at least 12 months.
In order to estimate or establish whether your organisation is responsible for any changes in wellbeing, you will still have to think about contribution or attribution . Read more about this in the section on Analysing and interpreting your results in this guide.
There may be cases where you are delivering a project that doesn’t have a clear start and end date, for example, a drop-in service. You should still consider asking your beneficiaries to complete a questionnaire when they first access your service or project and then again after a certain number of appointments or sessions. This number will depend on your Theory of Change and when (after how many months) you expect wellbeing to improve.
It is important that:
Think about your audience and choose the best format for them. You can collect data using:
The option you choose will depend on the literacy of your respondents, their access to the internet, the expertise of staff asking questions and your budget. If you’re doing a face-to-face survey, it’s important to pick the right person to ask the questions. They need to:
For more guidance on using questionnaires in evaluation, see NCVO Knowhow.
Below are a few things to check before you start collecting data. Ensure you:
You’re ready to learn how to choose the best measures for your evaluation!
