Understanding and researching wellbeing: Its usage in different disciplines and potential for health research and health promotion

Objectives: To report the findings of a literature review of the concept of wellbeing and consider its operational and heuristic potential within a range of disciplines.

Design: A literature review to examine the philosophical roots of wellbeing and the contributions of the main disciplines uncovered by the review; economics, psychology, health studies, sociology, anthropology and biomedicine.

Setting: 'Wellbeing' is a concept of increasing interest to those working in health promotion, social and public health medicine and medical sociology. Despite its popularity, wellbeing lacks a clear conceptual base and there is little consensus about how it may be identified, measured and achieved.

Method: Although conducted rigorously this was more of a scoping exercise than a systematic review. The reviewer was given a fairly broad exploratory brief including qualitative and quantitative dimensions. The search was restricted to articles in the English Language between the years 1980-2001.

Results: Most disciplines tended to be biased towards one or two aspects of the three major aspects of physical, social and psychological Wellbeing, with the main exception of child wellbeing studies. Those working in economics made a significant contribution to understanding conceptual elements of wellbeing. The fields of psychology and biomedicine were more concerned with negative than positive affect. There was a particular lack of consensus and research around social wellbeing.

Conclusion: Although wellbeing may indeed be extremely useful as a unifying concept for all those involved in health improvement or health research,at present it is being used unreflectively, thus potentially masking differences.