The Benefits and Challenges of a Unifying Conceptual Framework for Well-being Constructs

Centuries of philosophical debate and decades of empirical research have sought to characterize what it means to be psychologically well. A unifying conceptual framework to organize these diverse perspectives is needed to facilitate clear communication and cumulative science within the field of well-being science. Although a handful of overarching theoretical and measurement models of well-being have been proposed, they typically make strong claims about which constructs should be included or excluded as well as the manner and degree to which well-being constructs are related to one another. Thus, these models are often not widely adopted as organizational or communicative tools, due to their exclusion of particular theoretical perspectives or disagreement among researchers about the empirical structure of well-being. While the field continues to grapple with these issues, it would benefit from a unifying conceptual framework that is broad in scope and that can flexibly accommodate diverse theoretical perspectives and new empirical advances. In this paper, I discuss the benefits of a unifying conceptual framework for well-being, as well as the challenges in its construction. Specifically, I review strengths and limitations of Park et al.’s proposed framework of “emotional well-being,” and suggest an alternative framework of “psychosocial well-being” that encompasses the diverse array of constructs that have been proposed as positive psychological aspects of well-being.