Collective happiness: can there be a population-based approach to subjective well-being?
There is growing interest in using indicators of subjective well-being for population-level monitoring and policy evaluation. Subjective well-being indicators provide information about quality of life that is complementary to other social and economic indicators. Recent research has focused attention on the positive institutions and social conditions that contribute to subjective well-being. What does this research tell us about a population-level approach to promoting well-being? What roles can psychologists play in population-level approaches to well- being? The objective of this article is to give a selective overview of research on subjective well-being indicators and their implications for social policy and population-level interventions.