Understanding Well-Being. Review of European Literature 1995-2014

Well-being is a widely used concept embodying different dimensions of quality of life. This paper presents the results of a systematic review on the definition and usage of the concept in European literature. The study is based on the joint efforts of researchers form eleven countries who participated in the European Union research project Measuring Youth Well-Being (MYWeB). In order to assist and prepare a future European youth research, Researchers collected studies on youth well-being that where published in their own language and in English between 2009-2014. The inclusion criteria also covered the origin of the study being a partner country of the project, the type and age of the target groups (normal population, 10-25 years), the availability of full-text articles, and the methodological robustness of the study. After a three-phase procedure, 95 papers were selected for review. The examination of the notion of well-being revealed six domains and their corresponding indicators used for the construction of the concept. Well-being emerged as a predominantly psychological concept with strong cognitive, health-related, behavioural, and social aspects. Our paper concludes that more focus is needed on indicators of the social domain and the aspects of communication, the institutional environment and the embeddedness into information society.