Individual production of social well-being:an exploratory study

Improvement of well-being is a central objective in most policy making and individual behaviour. The pursuit of well-being is so common that it is almost trivial. What well-being is however, and how subjective well-being is affected by objective conditions, are by no means trivial questions. In this book, a theory that explicitly relates individual subjective well-being to objective conditions is elaborated. Social Production Function theory asserts that people, within the restrictions they face, produce their own well-being by trying to optimise their levels of social and physical well-being. In a qualitative study, the phenomenology of social well-being is explored and its three components - status, behavioural confirmation and affection - are conceptualised in terms that closely suit the day-to-day experience of Dutch adults. Although the means by which Dutch adults produce social well-being are manifold, the main relevant production factors are identified for each component of social well-being, using a systematic approach that distinguishes between six fields of production. People's well-being, however, does not depend solely on the amount of social and physical well-being that they produce, but also on the way in which they produce it. People are seriously concerned with the quality of their social production functions and the development of their productive capacity. These concerns are explored and described, resulting in a set of hierarchically ordered metagoals