Wellbeing Where People Live: Modeling Subjective Wellbeing, Social Vulnerability, and Quality of Life in Regional Communities

BackgroundSubjective wellbeing and happiness are among the most intensively measured constructs in psychology, yet the great majority of that measurement treats the individual as the unit of analysis and the place they live as incidental. Quality of life, however, varies systematically between communities and regions within the same country — often more than it varies between countries — and those differences track social vulnerability: the concentration of disadvantage, the availability of services and infrastructure, the strength of local social ties, and exposure to economic and environmental risk.Explaining that variation requires models that operate at the level where it occurs. Individual-level wellbeing research cannot easily distinguish a community whose residents are unhappy because of who lives there from one whose residents are unhappy because of what it is like to live there, and the two imply entirely different responses. Building that distinction into evidence demands careful quantitative work: indicators of wellbeing and social vulnerability that are valid and comparable across communities, multilevel and latent-variable models capable of separating compositional from contextual effects, and data collected at territorial scale rather than aggregated as an afterthought.This Research Topic brings together empirical modeling and quantitative assessment of subjective wellbeing, happiness and social vulnerability as determinants of quality of life in regional communities.GoalThe primary goal is to advance quantitative understanding of how social vulnerability shapes subjective wellbeing, happiness and quality of life at community and regional level, distinguishing the contribution of individual characteristics from that of the places in which people live.A second goal is methodological: to strengthen the measurement of wellbeing, happiness and social vulnerability in community settings, including the construction and validation of indicators and the comparability of measures across regions and populations.A third is to connect this evidence to application, examining how community-level wellbeing and vulnerability indicators can inform regional policy, monitoring and intervention.Scope1. Social vulnerability and wellbeing Quantitative evidence on how socioeconomic disadvantages, service access, infrastructure, environmental exposure and social cohesion relate to subjective wellbeing and quality of life in communities; compositional versus contextual explanations.2. Modeling community wellbeing Multilevel, structural equation, latent-variable and longitudinal models of wellbeing and quality of life at community and regional scale; disentangling individual- and area-level effects; small-area estimation and related approaches.3. Measurement and indicators Construction and psychometric validation of subjective wellbeing, happiness, social vulnerability and quality-of-life indicators for community use; measurement invariance across regions, languages and populations; composite indices and their limitations.4. Regional and territorial variation Comparative studies of wellbeing across regions, rural and peripheral communities, and territories experiencing economic transition, depopulation or concentrated disadvantage; under-represented regions particularly welcome.5. From evidence to policy Use of community wellbeing and vulnerability indicators in regional planning, monitoring and evaluation; evaluation of community-level interventions using quantitative designs.Outside the scope. Individual-level wellbeing studies with no community or territorial dimension; wellbeing intervention studies without quantitative modeling of context. Topic editors: Víctor Raúl López Ruiz, Noelia Somarriba Arechavala, NURIA HUETE-ALCOCER Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/86705/wellbeing-where-people-live-modeling-subjective-wellbeing-social-vulnerability-and-quality-of-life-in-regional-communities