About the Centre

Who are we?

We are a University of Oxford Research Centre, based at Harris Manchester College. We believe in high-end, interdisciplinary wellbeing research as a driver for public policy, interventions, and for improving the wellbeing of future generations. 

With a founding donation from KSI Education and the support of Harris Manchester College, the Centre is already becoming a major platform for empirical wellbeing research.

Our research group works closely with partners and the academic community to identify the key issues at stake in wellbeing science, and to undertake research to answer these research questions.

What do we do?

The Wellbeing Research Centre's work is published in a number of the world's leading academic journals, and is frequently featured on global media platforms.

The work we do falls into four primary research categories:

  • Measurement: we investigate how to define and measure wellbeing, harnessing big data to identify new ways to measure individual and community wellbeing.
  • Cause and Effect: we ask what the key drivers of wellbeing are across the life course, and how wellbeing impacts other outcomes like productivity, educational performance, and voting behaviour.
  • Policy and Intervention: we consider whether wellbeing should be a policy objective, and if so, how this should be operationalised in practice.
  • The Future of Wellbeing: we question how the future of work will impact wellbeing, and how to best code for optimising wellbeing in algorithms that enable human-centred AI.

We hope the impact this work is having on leaders and policy-makers will improve lives for years to come.

 

Annual Reports