Abstract
Going beyond a mere material understanding of well-being, more and more indicator sets are developed in order to measure well-being multidimensionally. Some of them include indicators for future well-being. Many authors argue that because well-being has different meanings in different contexts, the indicators should be adapted to each context in order to represent the well-being perception of the persons in question. The article deals with the questions how this could be done and presents the results of a case study on well-being perceptions of the citizens of the German city Wuppertal. One of the study goals was to analyze the well-being perceptions of the citizens and adapt the Better-life index (BLI) of the OECD to this context. The study results show that most of the participants of the workshop and respondents of the survey share a multidimensional understanding of well-being, including more than material aspects of wealth. In addition, the analysis indicates that well-being perceptions differ widely between the respondents. A number of commonalities and differences in well-being perceptions of different population groups are presented. Finally, conclusions for the derivation of a set of dimensions and indicators and learnings from the participation process are presented.
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Notes
Differences to the categories mentioned above come from the fact that not all topics mentioned in the discussion were also written down by the participants and therefore not pinned at the presentation wall.
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the project leaders and sub-project leader Maria Behrens, Uwe Schneidewind, and Philipp Schepelmann as well as her colleague Hans Haake for their dedicated support and the fruitful discussions.
Funding
The article is based on a study conducted as part of the research project ‘Well-Being Transformation Wuppertal (WTW),’ which was funded from 2015 to 2018 by the framework program ‘Research for Sustainable Development (FONA)’ of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under Grant 01UT1412A.
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Schleicher, K. Urban well-being indicators: learnings from a participatory adjustment of the OECD Better-Life Index. SN Soc Sci 1, 247 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-021-00256-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-021-00256-w