The Spanish tool that measures community well-being is gaining ground in other countries.
Madrid, April 25 (EFEverde).- The Community Wellbeing Index (CWI), a tool created by the Carlos III Health Institute and the Spanish National Research Council fifteen years ago, has gained traction in other countries and has proven effective in populations and contexts with linguistic, geographic, cultural, and socioeconomic diversity.
Researchers from the Carlos III Health Institute, in collaboration with scientific groups from Australia and South Africa, have conducted a study to analyze the potential international use of the tool developed in Spain to calculate and analyze well-being levels.
Community well-being is understood as the relationship between the objective conditions in which people live and their personal experiences of community life. Its measurement allows for assessing quality of life, guiding interventions, and evaluating the impact of community policies and projects, according to the Carlos III Health Institute (ISCIII).
The toolIn 2011, a team from the ISCIII (National Institute of Statistics and Census) led by researcher Maria Joao Forjaz of the National Center for Epidemiology, together with researchers from the Center for Human and Social Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), developed the Community Wellbeing Index (CWI). This index, based on a short questionnaire, measures community well-being from an individual perspective. A 2015 review of the same article described the tool as an "excellent" measure.
Research teams from South Africa and Australia became interested in the tool and contacted the ISCIII, jointly conducting a study to evaluate the psychometric properties of the tool in other languages , including English (Australia) and Setswana (South Africa).
The research has evaluated the validity and reliability of the CWI by adding data sets from two other countries to the original data set collected in Spain, and the results have supported this tool as a brief and easy-to-administer measure that assesses overall well-being and satisfaction at the community level.
After publishing their results, the ISCIII researchers explained that the CWI can be widely used in populations and contexts with linguistic, geographic, cultural, and socioeconomic diversity.
Furthermore, the inclusion of this Spanish tool in other international databases will allow for the comparison of community well-being across different regions, the identification of inequalities, and the ability to provide guidance for public policy decision-making. EFEverde
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