Are we asking the right questions?
A peak behind the scenes of My Wellness Check — how are we conducting research on wellbeing, and how can you get involved?
Measuring wellbeing is inherently subjective. What constitutes wellbeing for one person may not reflect a state of wellbeing for the next. The MyWellnessCheck.org research team is thus taking a human-centered participatory research approach in order to better understand how to effectively measure wellbeing.
This approach entails developing the service together with our community where we place the needs and concerns of the community as our focus to ensure a result that is impactful.
In order to achieve this, we are, for example, conducting interviews via Zoom with MyWellnessCheck.org users in which we discuss what you think about wellbeing, what the important contributing factors are, and go through the entire check together, to experience it the way you do.
By partnering with you and others in the My Wellness Check community, we can learn what makes the wellness check valuable. Are we asking the right questions with our survey? Our aim is to create a survey in partnership with our community and identify what survey questions and feedback are meaningful. We do this by asking you to be involved with shaping the survey questions and feedback through iterative design cycles. Our aim is to create a participatory survey, in which the community helps to shape the survey questions through iterative feedback and design cycles.
From these interviews we are getting closer and closer to finding out which characteristics of questions our community likes to be asked and which incite the most reflection. Some key findings so far are that Covid-19 has had both positive and negative effects on wellbeing, and that participants strongly desire questions that encourage the reflection of positive impact next to the negative ones.
Another key insight is that participants currently miss feedback from the service with one participant remarking:
“Make me feel like I am a part of something!”
Together, as a community, we are discussing what kinds of feedback are desired and helpful. Some of us wish to see how many people are participating, or to see what others are saying, while others are in great need of help and resources to help themselves. The team is currently working on implementing these suggestions!
If you want to help us improve the MyWellnessCheck experience, please take this short survey about the survey! You can also email the team anytime and we can set up an interview 😃
Written by Antonia Fedlmeier & Willem van der Maden
