http://www.primecentre.wales/social-care-consensus-meeting.php

1. Steve Smith
steve.smith@southwales.ac.uk
Gideon Calder
gideon.calder@southwales.ac.uk
@gideoncalder
Centre for Social Policy
University of South Wales
Setting the social care
research priorities for
Cardiff, 5 October 2015

2.  To consider some general conceptual
issues relevant to our understanding
of well-being
 To look at the aims and provisions of
the Well Being of Future Generations
(Wales) Act 2015 and some of the
implications of the approach it takes
 To get us thinking about how these
factors might influence a social care
research agenda
Aims

3. Stiglitz Commission, Office for
National Statistics: dissatisfaction with
economic/ GDP-based indicators
Basic questions arising:
 So what is well-being, then?
 How does it relate to other values and
priorities (fairness, equality, etc)?
 How do we balance the quantitative, the
qualitative and the philosophical elements
of the well-being ‘package’?
A simple working definition:
Well-being relates to how well a
person’s life is going
The well-
being
debate:
some
background

4. Objective
Set aside individual perceptions,
experiences, beliefs
Focus on externally assessible indicators by
which to measure w-b, e.g.
 Education (numeracy, literacy, etc)
 Health (conditions, morbidity, etc)
 Socio-economic (housing, income, social capital,
etc)
 Opportunity (employability, capabilities, etc)
Subjective
Set aside external indicators like those above
Focus on the ‘internal’ viewpoint of the
individual
 Feelings and experiences (joy, optimism, pain, etc)
 How a person evaluates their own life (as
worthwhile, successful, under-achieving, etc)
Objective
and
subjective
accounts

5. regardless of what they themselves see as being in their
own best interests.
We may find this in the tendency to favour pre-
defined lists of policies and practices which
promote well-being
Problem? Objective approaches may appear
overly paternalistic or ‘nanny-ish’
Non-paternalistic accounts will insist that the individual
themselves is in the best position to gauge their own
well-being, from their own perspective.
We will find this wherever research starts with
the perspective of particular individuals, rather
than presuming a definition of well-being in
advance
Problem? These approaches may appear too
vague or inconsistent to be of use in promoting
well-being
Paternalistic
and non-
paternalistic
accounts

6.  Comes into force: Spring 2016
 A big target: improving the long-term
social, economic, environmental and
cultural well-being of Wales.
 Requires public bodies (from WG
ministers, through Public Health Wales to
the National Library) to
 set well-being objectives to contribute to
the achievement of well-being goals
(prosperity, resilience, health, equality,
community cohesion, cultural/linguistic
vibrancy, global responsibility)
 do those things in accordance with the
sustainable development principle:
the body must act in a manner which
seeks to ensure that the needs of the present
are met without compromising the ability of
future generations to meet their own needs
 Creates Future Generations
Commissioner for Wales.
Well-Being
of Future
Generations
(Wales) Act
2015

7. Key strengths:
 Joined up and integrative
 Combines social and environmental
justice
 Far-sighted and holistic
 Pluralistic and multi-level in its
applications
BUT
 Offers different definition of ‘well-being’
from the Social Services and Well-Being
Act
 Does not obviously resolve the tensions
between objective, subjective,
paternalistic and non-paternalistic strains
in well-being debates
 So: gives us a strong, topical and urgent
basis for research in social care
Well-Being
of Future
Generations
(Wales) Act
2015

8. How can we best balance objective and
subjective factors in our research,
especially given the overall scope and remit
of the PRIME Centre?
What kinds of research will serve us best in
exploring the quality of social care?
How best can we appreciate (and integrate)
the relationship between health and social
care, in addressing well-being?
Which audiences and contexts should we
address, to achieve those insights, and the
most useful kinds of evidence?
Key
questions