An empirical comparison of well-being measures used in the UK

A number of different, yet related, measures of subjective well-being (SWB) and health are used across government departments. Under its Measuring National Well-being Programme, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) has adopted the use of the short Warwick Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (SWEMWBS) and the General Health Quest ionnaire (GHQ-12) which is a mental health screening measure, as well as four summary subjective (personal) well-being questions which ask about life satisfaction, happiness and anxiety yesterday, and worthwhileness (the ONS-4). I n addition to the measures used within the ONS framework, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) currently preferthe EQ-5D, a measure of health-related quality of life (HRQoL), in the assessment of medical technologies and public health interventions, while social care guidance includes measures of capability and need, the Investigating Choice Experiments Capability Measures for Older people/Adults(ICECAP-A and ICECAP-O) and the Adult Social Care Outcomes Toolkit (ASCOT). There is limited evidence on how these measures relate to each other, which causes difficulty in the comparison of results across datasets and evaluations containing different measures as well as for informing decisions across sectors. Given that these measures are used to inform policy making throughout Government, it is important to better understand how these measures compare. The Department of Health has asked the Policy Research Unit in Economic Evaluation of Health and Care Interventions (EEPRU) to undertake a conceptual and empirical comparison of these six commonly used measures of health and well-being: SWEMWBS, GHQ-12, ONS-4, ICECAP-A, ASCOT and EQ-5D. This report summarises psychometric analysis including factor analysis which sought to compare the ONS- 4, the SWEMWBS/WEMWBS, the GHQ-12, the ICECAP-A or ICECAP- O, ASCOT, the EQ-5D and the SF-6D. The report also takes into consideration additional measures of SWB found within the datasets to shed further light on these comparisons and the concepts behind the measures.