This report presents preliminary findings from the pretest of the second Social Well-Being Survey in Asia (SoWSA-2), conducted in Japan in September 2025. The main surveys will be fielded in eight Asian countries from 2026 onward. SoWSA-2 examines similarities and differences in social well-being―conceptualized as the interplay among micro-, meso-, and macro-level features of society―through cross-national comparison. The questionnaire retains items from SoWSA-1 (2015-2017) to enable decade-long comparisons and adds new instruments reflecting recent developments in well-being research. Findings are as follows. (1) Relative to SoWSA-1, SoWSA-2 respondents reported lower socioeconomic status, subjective well-being, and social capital, yet they held more positive perceptions of Japanese society. Variability across all measures was greater in SoWSA-2. These differences may reflect house effects stemming from different online survey providers or genuine social changes over the past decade. (2) Newly introduced scales―interdependent happiness, perceived social exclusion, and social flourishing―exhibited acceptable internal validity. Free translation into Japanese performed better than literal translation. (3) Quality-check items instructing respondents to select a specified response effectively detected careless answering, especially when accompanied by an explicit note that the item served as a quality check. These results will inform revisions to the English questionnaire and its translations for the 2026 main survey.
Kanai et al. (Mon,) studied this question.