The Usefulness of Intersubjective Community Wellbeing as a Community Development Indicator: Evidence from Comparing Three Approaches to Measuring Community Wellbeing

Abstract

A critical issue in CWB studies is how to measure Community Wellbeing (CWB). While prior studies have focused on subjective and objective indicators for CWB measurements, this study introduces the intersubjective metric, identifying its necessity, importance, and usefulness. To this end, we collected objective data, subjective, and intersubjective data from Korea City Stat and CWB survey, and measured community wellbeing for twenty-seven communities in Korea from these three perspectives. We then compared and analyzed the three measurements (i.e., objective, subjective, and intersubjective approaches) using distance analysis, mean comparison analysis, and correlation analysis through the standardization and regularization process. The results of analyses demonstrated that the intersubjective CWB indicators are useful in themselves. Based on these findings, we hope that in future community well-being studies, the intersubjective indicators will be used as indicators for local development beyond simple indicators dealing with objective conditions and subjective satisfaction. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.