Module 6: Measuring wellbeing
Complementary perspectives
When gaining insights into wellbeing, both quantitative data and community insights are important. They offer complementary perspectives.
Statistical data
Statistical data help to paint a broad picture of wellbeing, providing insights into key wellbeing outcomes (e.g., life expectancy, education rates or CO2 emissions), how these outcomes are trending over time and how they may differ between regions or population groups. Statistical data can also be used to measure progress towards national or global goals.
Community insights
Community insights provide a deeper, more nuanced understanding of how people experience wellbeing in their daily lives and what the drivers and barriers to wellbeing are. They help to reveal the cultural and social contexts that influence and shape wellbeing. In addition, statistical data may not reflect the wellbeing of minority communities or marginalised groups in society. Community insights can help to ensure that their voices are being heard.
The Doughnut Economics Action Lab offers tools to create both a Data Portrait of Place as well as a Community Portrait of Place. The Doughnut Unrolled toolkit unrolls the Doughnut into four 'lenses' that explore social and ecological issues, while combining the local aspirations of a place with its global responsibilities, to identify possible entry-points for transformative action.
The Data Portrait of Place provides guidance and resources to create a holistic data-led snapshot of what it means for a place to thrive while helping to bring humanity into the Doughnut. It invites policymakers to collect and compare desired outcomes versus current performance of their place using available data. For a collection of useful examples and results from the growing number of places that have already begun using the Data Portrait to inform transformative action, check out these Data Portraits in Action. Or see how the Data Portrait for your country compares with that of other countries.
The Community Portrait of Place offers participatory workshop approaches that can be used to bring community insights into the assessment of social and ecological performance. It invites the people of a place to share their knowledge, ideas, experience and aspirations, to build a rich picture, or 'Community Portrait', that can keep evolving as more voices contribute, and as knowledge, ideas, experience and aspirations change over time.
The Data and Community Portrait of Place complement each other and bring together quantifiable aspects of wellbeing with community insights to jointly paint a rich picture of wellbeing.