Measuring National Well-being: What Matters to You?’ What Matters to Whom?

The ‘Measuring National Well-Being: What Matters to You?’ debate was conducted and analysed by the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) in 2010-11. The nation offered 34,000 responses to improve understandings of national wellbeing, yet the evidence base does not appear to represent most of these forms of participation. This chapter proposes that secondary qualitative analysis of free-text fields called ‘Other’ contributes to the national wellbeing evidence base and expands on the potential of social survey data collection beyond calculating the social indicator. Savage and Burrows explained the social survey’s capacity to ‘imagine the nation’ (2007). This chapter suggests that analysis of survey free-text fields is an under-investigated, but increasingly necessary methodology for progress towards understanding the nation in an era of automated ‘big data’.