New directions in cross-cultural well-being research

Résumé En

In this article, I attempt to give insights into the potentials and limits of quantitative well-being approaches. Starting with the main historical achievements, I present an overview of the development stages in quality of life research. I then focus on the potential new field of societal well-being, since theoretically driven and multidimensional concepts to measure perceptions of societal developments are still widely absent in well-being research. I give examples based on cross-national surveys of how to monitor societal well-being over time and how to test for equivalent indicators. As a last step, I focus on the limits of cross-cultural comparisons as the main methodological challenge in well-being research. Content validity is especially crucial to assess well-being in a culture-specific way, and several steps must be achieved to reach the goal of comparability. I end with the systematic question of how to potentially fulfil both quality criteria in cross-cultural research, i. e. content validity and equivalence.