Social well-being has been identified by the World Health Organization [WHO] (1948) as a central component of individuals’ overall health. The concept has been conceptualized and operationalized in many different ways.
Within economic disciplines, studies have initially operationalized social well-being using objective criteria such as gross domestic product (GDP) that reflects the relative prosperity of communities and societies; more recently, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] (2011) proposed additional criteria, besides macroeconomic statistics, to better measure individuals’ perceptions of well-being and progress. Research within social sciences has operationalized social well-being in terms of behaviors that reflect community and organizational participation, community or group membership, or social capital and social cohesion (Andrews & Withey, 1976; Coleman, 1988; Putnam, 2000).Within psychology, the focus has been on individual-level.
