About the Centre
The Wellbeing Research Centre is an interdisciplinary research group focused on the empirical study of wellbeing.
Our Centre is a stimulating home for scholars engaged in world-class research on wellbeing across the life course and in the context of schools, businesses and public policy. The Centre also functions as a platform for knowledge exchange for affiliated scholars at the University of Oxford and beyond.
We are proud to be the publishing hub of the world’s foremost annual publication on wellbeing, the World Happiness Report, and a founding member and academic partner of the World Wellbeing Movement.
Through our work, we seek to advance our collective understanding of human wellbeing in order to help communities around the world improve quality of life for both current and future generations.
Our research
The main focus of our research is on measures that capture how people feel about their lives and what the causes and consequences are of differences in wellbeing between individuals as well as changes over time.
We seek to advance the research frontier using interdisciplinary and empirical approaches often leading us to collaborate with institutional partners that help enable and apply research insights. Our research agenda tends to address questions along four research streams: Measurement, Cause and Effect, Policy and Interventions, and The Future of Wellbeing.
Our publications
Research findings by the group have been published in the leading academic journals across multiple disciplines including Nature, Science, The British Medical Journal, Psychological Science, PNAS, and Management Science and have been reported on in the world’s premier news outlets.
Research publications