Converting measures of mental health and wellbeing into WELLBYs
This page is under construction and will be updated soon.
At the Happier Lives Institute, we evaluate the effect of interventions using subjective wellbeing (SWB) as our primary outcome. This is classically measured with questions asking people to self-report how happy or satisfied they are on scale of 0 to 10. However, there is often too little classical SWB data available about the interventions we evaluate. Therefore, we also include in our reports the much more prevalent measures of affective mental health (MHa) such as mental distress, stress, depression, and anxiety. Is this appropriate? We have discussed this before in different reports. In this report we give a fuller standalone explanation of our methods. We explore whether standardised effects from MHa are an acceptable proxy for standardised effects from SWB. This is an ongoing topic of interest which we will update over time.