The architecture of social well-being: The interactions between objective and subjective indicators

Although recent multidimensional approaches have sought to expand the measurement of well-being beyond material aspects, few studies have simultaneously examined the interactions between objective, subjective, and community dimensions within a unified framework of social well-being in an urban context. This study addresses this gap by empirically analyzing how these three dimensions jointly shape household well-being in Mexico City. Data were obtained from the Multidimensional Social Well-being Survey (2024), a probabilistic, stratified, cluster-based survey representative of the city's 16 municipalities (N = 400). Measurement was carried out using the D M M − R L method — an extension of the DP2 approach designed to handle continuous, ordinal, and binary indicators within a single composite index — and K-means clustering was applied to classify households into four well-being levels, with bootstrap confidence intervals estimated for all contributions. The findings show that social well-being is deeply unequal and multidimensional. Employment, quality of living spaces, and education are the strongest contributors to well-being, yet their distribution is structurally unequal across household groups. Households with low well-being concentrate disadvantages not only in income and food security but also in higher levels of depression and anxiety, limited cultural participation, scarce leisure time, and greater exposure to crime and perceptions of insecurity. These deficits are not isolated but mutually reinforcing, confirming that social well-being cannot be reduced to any single dimension. These results underscore the need for multidimensional policy interventions that simultaneously address material deficits, mental health, community safety, and neighborhood conditions.