Different People, Same Place

Read the blog post: Considering community wellbeing in times of Covid-19 and levelling up here.

Better understanding the relationships between individual and place-based community wellbeing

During the Covid-19 pandemic, many people relied on their communities for support more than ever before, and the impact of where we live and work on how we feel became more apparent. The pandemic brought into sharp focus the importance of our communities in how we are doing and a greater urgency to the levelling up agenda which was first proposed by the UK Government prior to the pandemic.

The UK Government’s commitment to levelling up is now set out in a comprehensive White Paper at the heart of which is a recognition that not all places benefit from the same physical and social infrastructure, and people’s sense of pride in and connection to their communities is not equally distributed (1). These features of community are all understood to be aspects of overall “community wellbeing”.

However, as the levelling up agenda brings focus to the differences between places, it is also important to understand the different experiences of people within the same place. While focusing on community wellbeing can help us understand the differences between places, understanding individual wellbeing can bring focus to the different experiences of people within the same place, helping us to better understand the drivers of inequality and disadvantage. Unpacking how individual wellbeing and community wellbeing may be related and how changes in one may lead to changes in the other was at the heart of this project.

This understanding can inform those designing and delivering community based interventions to address key priorities such as increasing wellbeing, supporting levelling up or building community cohesion.

A new model for community and individual wellbeing

In 2021, we conducted an evidence review and expert consultation which drew together the best current understanding of how individual and community wellbeing are related.

While the work demonstrated that separating individual and community wellbeing is challenging, a simplified model was designed to show how it might be done. Showing the connections between the two, it separates subjective and objective factors at the individual and community levels, as well as the ‘link’ or mechanisms through which these interact.

Different-People-Same-Place-downloadable-model

A tool to improve community and individual wellbeing

People working in communities can draw on data about their local area and evidence from other studies to populate the model in relation to their area of focus.

This can help to:

• Think through the characteristics of a community and its population that are relevant to wellbeing, to identify whether an intervention or change might affect individual or community wellbeing, or both;
• Identify how interventions or changes might impact aspects of wellbeing;
• Consider whether an intervention or changes might affect different people in the same place in different ways, and whether there are groups who might not benefit;
• Construct theories of change for interventions, and develop hypotheses to test through evaluation;
• Support the selection of appropriate measures for evaluation, when used alongside other research on measures of wellbeing at individual and community level;
• Guide co-production of community-level initiatives and interventions.

While the model can support the exploration of these topics, it can’t tell communities what to do. We do not yet have enough robust data at place level to populate the model with all of the factors of interest and more research is needed to establish their interrelationships. That said, our study did start to explore a number of factors and found some interesting results.

Quantitative analysis findings

Through the project, some of the relationships set out in the model were investigated where relevant data was available at Local Authority level. The data came from the ‘Understanding Society’ survey from 2014–16.

This survey asked people about whether they liked living in their neighbourhoods. It also asked questions about volunteering, voting, and socialising with neighbours. This identified some important relationships between objective community factors and both individual and community level wellbeing (3):

Significant associations

• Area-level volunteering rates were associated with both community and individual subjective wellbeing.
• Higher voting rates were associated with better individual subjective wellbeing.
• Higher area-level average income was associated with better individual subjective wellbeing.
• People living in urban areas had worse absolute and relative community subjective wellbeing than those living in rural areas, particularly where voting rates were low.

Walkable assets and wellbeing

Our analysis threw up some unexpected findings which we decided to investigate further. For example, it showed that areas with higher numbers of walkable assets (4) were associated with lower individual and community wellbeing.

This finding seemed counterintuitive, so we undertook further analysis to see if there might be another confounding factor that could explain this relationship. We found that when we controlled for “perceptions of safety” within the community along with other factors these relationships were no longer seen. This suggests that we should not assume that it is the number of walkable assets that is associated with poorer wellbeing.

Different experiences in the same place

The analysis also found some important relationships showing that different people in the same place may be impacted differently by changes in the objective features of their community:

• In more sociable areas, where a higher proportion of people report talking regularly to their neighbours, less sociable people had worse mental wellbeing than sociable people; and less sociable individuals also had worse mental wellbeing in sociable areas than in unsociable areas. In more sociable areas, people aged 50+ had better absolute and relative community subjective wellbeing than aged under 50.
• Unemployment rates were negatively associated with community and individual subjective wellbeing. Higher area-level unemployment was associated with worse community subjective wellbeing for the employed, but not the unemployed. Those aged 50-70 years had better mental wellbeing than those aged less than 50 years when unemployment was relatively low. However, in areas with higher unemployment rates, these age differences fell away.
• While higher area-level income was associated with proportionally better mental wellbeing, this relationship was weaker for households with larger incomes.

“The research showed that some of the subjective factors proposed as ‘links’ were mediating the relationships between objective community factors and subjective individual and community wellbeing.”

It also showed some of these seemed to be more important than others:

• Feeling a sense of belonging was more strongly linked to better subjective wellbeing than perceiving local friendships mattered or that they were able to access local services.
• At the individual-level, perceptions of difficulties managing financially, thinking that finances would be worse in the future, and loneliness were associated with higher odds of low subjective wellbeing.

Qualitative research findings

Through our qualitative interviews and discussions with stakeholders, including people working in local government, policy, academic and the VCSE sector, we found that:

• A lack of representative data at local authority level, and for smaller places (e.g. neighbourhoods or small towns) means that people working in communities don’t have all the information they need to populate the model with data for their places.
• Power sharing and co-production with priority groups are considered to be key mechanisms in addressing the risk that interventions will have negative or unintended consequences for those individuals. There is limited evidence on whether and how co-production affects subjective wellbeing and participation alone is not enough – there are also concerns about who participates and the quality of engagement (5).
• While models can be helpful in provoking new thinking about how different factors within a community interact, we need to avoid implying that there is a single “right” way of improving wellbeing at individual or community level.

Areas for action

The work has highlighted areas of research for further exploration and actions people working in communities to improve wellbeing can take.

These include:

Funders, commissioners and practitioners

• Consider the complex interactions between individual and community level factors, and the potential for the same intervention to affect people with different characteristics, circumstances or experiences in different ways.
• Use the model and findings to think through how their interventions will affect community and individual wellbeing.
• Use the model to consider how their work may fit with and link to other work to improve wellbeing, whether at individual or community level, to help identify potential partners.
• Design evaluations to test the relationships between different objective and subjective factors and the links between them, drawing on the new model and wider guidance around measuring wellbeing.

Researchers

• Keep in mind that the impacts of community interventions may not be seen if data is only collected at local authority level.
• Support work to collect and analyse data across smaller communities, or within the communities that people themselves define as meaningful.
• Undertake further testing of the model, for example at lower administrative levels (e.g. Lower Super Output Areas) or across places as people themselves define them (e.g. individual towns / villages rather than administrative districts), or even across non-geographic communities.
• Test the relationships set out in the model as part of evaluation of individual interventions.
• Continue work to develop and measure a consistent set of local area indicators of individual and community wellbeing – including subjective wellbeing – that are statistically representative at lower geographical and community-levels and easily accessible.
• Continue work to explore the links between community wellbeing and wider national or international contexts, and to map different measures onto the developed models.

Suggested citation:

Jopling K, Martin S, Hey N, Hvide L. Better understanding the relationships between individual and place-based community wellbeing, Briefing, March 2022, What Works Centre for Wellbeing.

>> Download the model of Individual and Community Wellbeing

>> Download the presentation slides

With the project Different People, Same Place, we explored the relationship between community wellbeing and individual wellbeing.

The work also looked at how this relationship differs for different locations and individuals, and sought to answer the research question: What are the relationships between community wellbeing and the wellbeing of different individuals and identified groups within that community?

As part of the project, the team mapped mechanisms that link community and individual wellbeing, and inequalities, together. The result is the Model of Individual and Community Wellbeing. 

Model presentation

The team leading the research are Laura Kudrna, Oyinlola Oyebode, Sarah Atkinson and Sarah Stewart-Brown. In this video, Laura presents the model, who and what it’s for, and how it might help organisations with their work – bridging the research with practical use.

"Perhaps this approach to individual and community wellbeing will be useful to you, especially if you are thinking about evaluating the effectiveness of community initiatives, and its impact on different but related levels of individual and community wellbeing."

Mechanisms - making the link(s)

While focusing on community wellbeing can help us understand the differences between places, understanding individual wellbeing can bring focus to the different experiences of people within the same place, helping us to better understand the drivers of inequality and disadvantage. Unpacking how individual wellbeing and community wellbeing may be related and how changes in one may lead to changes in the other was at the heart of this project.

The model shows some of the pathways through which different interventions and initiatives might impact individual and community wellbeing. It can be complex to change wellbeing and so the model does not seek to explain everything. Instead, the purpose of the model is to inform work in this area by providing more clarity about the relationships between individual and community wellbeing.

Model structure and usage

On the top there are three components of community wellbeing, which are community-level objective factors, subjective ‘links’ or mechanisms, and subjective wellbeing. Communities may be groups like local areas and communities (such as workplaces, schools, or communities of identity, such as religion and sexuality), although the text in this model is about local areas, and it could be modified to be about another community.

On the bottom there are the three components of individual wellbeing, which refer to people within these communities: individual level objective factors, subjective psychological ‘links’ or mechanisms, and subjective wellbeing. 

The model could be arranged differently, in terms of what is on the left and what is on the right, because there are bidirectional relationships between these concepts, represented by bidirectional arrows. More arrows could be added too, depending on the relationships proposed for a particular context. 

Currently, the model is arranged from the perspective of decision-makers who have access to levers that allow them to alter the objective community factors shown on the upper left. Sometimes objective community factors are perceived as more fluid and easier to change, such as the provision of benches in the local area or housing availability. Sometimes they are seen as more fixed and relatively harder to change, such as whether a community is in an urban or rural location and wider political factors. 

On the right are subjective reports of wellbeing. For individuals, these could be thoughts about life overall or their day-to-day feelings. At the community level, these could be thoughts about the community, feelings when in the community, or inequalities in subjective wellbeing. In the middle, linking the objective factors to wellbeing experiences, are subjective ‘links’ or mechanisms. These are the processes by which changes on the left-hand side might convert into wellbeing on the right hand side. Mechanisms might be at the individual level, such as if an individual has high self-esteem, or at the community level, such as individual perceptions that local facilities like shops and parks are satisfactory, or the proportion of people in an area that perceive the area positively.

The difference between the subjective mechanisms and subjective wellbeing is that the mechanisms are about how people think and feel about certain aspects of their lives or their communities (e.g. their sense of belonging to the local area, their relationships with others or how easily they can access local services) whereas subjective wellbeing is more purely about thoughts and feelings irrespective of these specific aspects (an evaluation of whether it’s a good place to live, day-to-day feelings about the place, an evaluation of how their life is going, how happy they feel right now).

As an example of a pathway cutting through some of the model, local-level income inequality (a fluid community objective factor) could be associated with someone feeling sad (individual subjective wellbeing) because people feel like they don’t belong to their local area (a subjective community mechanism). However, subjective wellbeing can drive community or individual objective factors – happier people might be more likely to volunteer, for example (Hansen, Aartsen, Slagsvold and Deindl, 2018). And the individual and community boxes are related: communities experiencing positive feelings about their area (top right) are likely to have individuals within them who are happier (bottom right), as has been shown for workplace communities (Whitman, Van Rooy and Viswesvaran, 2010). 

In addition, the same fluid community intervention on the left, such as a park, may affect people with different fixed individual factors differently, such as people with mobility impairments who may be unable to use the park if it is not designed to be accessible.

Suggested citation for the report:

Kudrna L, Oyebode O, Quinn L, Atkinson S, Stewart-Brown S. The model of individual and community wellbeing, Model, March 2022, What Works Centre for Wellbeing.

>> Download the report

The Different People, Same Place work investigated the relationships between individual and place-based community wellbeing.

It was led by teams at the Universities of Birmingham, Durham and Warwick who developed a model outlining these interrelationships, and tested it with stakeholders and with quantitative data.

In this technical report, the team shares the phases of the research project:

Phase 1 – Model development (rapid evidence review and consultation group).

• What are the relationships between community wellbeing and the wellbeing of different individuals and groups within that community?

Phase 2 – Quantitative model mapping and testing (secondary data analysis).

• How can these relationships be modelled quantitatively using measures of community, individual wellbeing and measures for the quantity and quality of relationships and sense of belonging to a place?

Phase 3 – Qualitative exploration of model, barriers, enablers (individual qualitative interviews).

• What are the barriers and enablers (context and social infrastructure) to achieving a cycle of positive outcomes for individuals and communities, while addressing any trade-offs or risks of negative outcomes for different individuals/groups? How does the developed model of community wellbeing resonate with users and can it be applied?