Some Critical Reflections on the Measurement of Social Sustainability and Well-Being in Complex Societies

Alberto Arcagni, Marco Fattore, Filomena Maggino and Giorgio Vittadini ()
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Alberto Arcagni: Department MEMOTEF, University of Rome La Sapienza, Via del Castro Laurenziano 9, 00161 Rome, Italy
Marco Fattore: Department of Statistics and Quantitative Methods, University of Milano-Bicocca, Piazza dell’Ateneo Nuovo 1, 20126 Milan, Italy
Filomena Maggino: Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Rome La Sapienza, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Rome, Italy

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 22, 1-16

Abstract: The aim of this discussion paper is to raise awareness of the conceptual and practical limits of mainstream practices in social measurement and to suggest possible directions for social indicator construction, in view of effectively supporting policies for social sustainability and well-being promotion. We start with a review of the epistemological issues raised by the measurement of social phenomena, investigate the notion of social complexity, and discuss the critical link between it and measurement. We then suggest that social indicators should be primarily designed to build structural syntheses of the data, unfolding the patterns and stylizing the complexity of social phenomena, rather than computed pursuing numerical precision, through hardly interpretable aggregated measures. This calls for tools and algorithms capable of rendering structural information, preserving the essential traits of complexity and overcoming the limitations of classical aggregation procedures. We provide some examples along this line, using real data pertaining to regional well-being in OECD countries.

Keywords: complexity; non-aggregative approach; social measurement; social sustainability; synthetic indicators; well-being (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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