The Joy is Mine: Re-centering the Person in the Study of Well-Being

Over the last several decades, promoting the happiness of citizens has become a priority across the globe. However, much of the empirical work does not reflect the foundational theories suggesting that capturing, operationalizing, and modeling well-being is best done at the person level. In this paper, we argue that well-being science needs to re-center the person in research to accurately assess the dynamic and unique ways well-being unfolds. We first highlight why well-being is best understood as an idiographic, person-specific construct. We argue that well-being is best captured as a dynamic system and should reflect the unique building blocks of a person based on meaning-making processes. We then integrate the two to show how dynamic meaning-making gives way to understanding the structure and processes of well-being. We conclude by pointing to ways researchers can use idiographical approaches with new methodological advances to answer long-standing questions in the field.