SIPHER-7 wellbeing indicators
SIPHER built models to predict the causal relationships between policy interventions and health outcomes. SIPHER-7 is a suite of seven wellbeing indicators, selected by the SIPHER team through an iterative consultation process, to capture multi-dimensional wellbeing outcomes of different policies.
Typically, policy makers have determined wellbeing by looking at people's income. This is a very crude measure as not everything that matters in our lives comes down to money.
SIPHER developed a new set of indicators representing different aspects of people's lives to help us better measure their wellbeing.
Our objectives were to:
- identify a set of domains of life that collectively represent the overall wellbeing of a person
- for each domain, to identify just one indicator to best represent the domain.
The SIPHER-7 Wellbeing indicators represent the following aspects of people's lives and help us capture their wellbeing.
- Loneliness
- Neighbourhood Safety
- Housing quality
- Effects of physical health on daily activity
- Effects of mental health on daily activity
- Household disposable income
- Employment situation
But having a set of wellbeing indicators does not help those making policy decisions if a policy results in an improvement in some indicators and deterioration in others. Workstrand 6 (Societal Valuation) collapsed the seven wellbeing indicators into a single index metric for wellbeing, equivalent income.
SIPHER Glossary For clarification of our terminology and use of acronyms.
Contact: sipher@glasgow.ac.uk
Related Resources
- Ta, A., Van Landeghem, B. and Tsuchiya, A. (2024) Eliciting public preferences across health and wellbeing dimensions: an equivalent income value set for SIPHER-7. Health Economics. ISSN 1057-9230 https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.4890
- Review of SIPHER-7 wellbeing indicators [PDF] - December 2022
- Blog: Collasping multi-dimensional wellbeing into equivalent income - March 2022
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SIPHER-7 [PDF] A seven indicator outcome measure to capture wellbeing for economic evaluation - September 2021
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SIPHER Glossary For clarification of our terminology and use of acronyms.
Techincal Information
Providing details of the Domain Preferences - Survey Data Set including strengths.
Context
SIPHER’s WS6 team developed a wellbeing indicator set comprising seven indicators - SIPHER-7. While SIPHER-7 describes people’s wellbeing as combinations of these seven indicators (or SIPHER-7 states), when some indicators improve and others worsen, it is difficult to judge whether overall wellbeing is improving or worsening.
The purpose of this part of the project is to collapse the multi-dimensional wellbeing indicators into a single index metric for wellbeing, equivalent income. Equivalent income is defined for each SIPHER-7 state and represents the amount of income that somebody would need to feel the same level of wellbeing as their current state, if the six non-income wellbeing indicators were at the best levels. Based on how important each of the six non-income indicators are, equivalent income adjusts actual income downwards. If the non-income indicators are all at the best levels, then the level of equivalent income is the same as actual income.
To do this, four surveys using Discrete Choice Experiments (DCE) were conducted. Participants were asked a set of ten choice tasks, each involving two imaginary scenarios described in terms of SIPHER-7 and select which scenario they believed was better. In three of the surveys, participants were asked to complete the tasks from a personal perspective (i.e., which scenario they would want for themselves), and in the remaining survey, participants were asked to complete the task from a social perspective (i.e., which scenario they think would be better for policy makers to bring about for others). The econometrically estimated parameters represent the importance given to the seven wellbeing indicators of SIPHER-7 relative to each other by samples of the UK public. These parameters allow researchers to calculate equivalent income for different SIPHER-7 states and to make comparisons of multi-dimensional wellbeing.
Strengths
The Discrete Choice Experiment data on relative preferences allow the calculation of equivalent income for any combination of SIPHER-7 indicators. The samples are large (ranging from 1000 to 3000, totalling just under 11,000) and representative of the UK general public in terms of age and sex.
Geography
The surveys collected data from participants resident in the UK with sampling quotas for age and for sex.
Time Period
There are four datasets: (1) people’s personal preferences in autumn 2020 (during the Covid-19 pandemic); (2) people’s personal preferences in autumn 2021 (after the pandemic); (3) people’s personal preferences in spring 2022; (4) people’s social preferences in spring 2022. Dataset (2) includes returning respondents from (1). Otherwise, the observations are independent.
Variables/indicators
In addition to the DCE choice data, the surveys include participant self-reported data on: SIPHER-7; household size; age; gender; etc. Surveys (1) and (2) use the original SIPHER-7. Surveys (3) and (4) use the revised version of SIPHER-7.
Link with Other Models and Data
The estimated parameters can be used to calculate an equivalent income variable in the Synthetic Population.