Members of the Social Weather team recently authored a commentary piece that was published in Think Global Health. In it, the team noted the importance of social relationships to physical, mental and community health. However, the field of social well-being is one that is relatively understudied, and thus we lack strategies to better measure and promote well-being in communities.
The team put forth a vision of a more holistic approach to well-being promotion that would generate evidence and proof for how social connections within communities lead to improvements in the overall health of those communities. Key steps in this work include taking a community-engaged approach to understanding key driving factors, comparing communities based on socio-demographic profiles to learn from communities that are high performing, and funding community-driven projects that seek to inform decision-making through improvements in local data quality.