A working paper to accompany the coproduced report on A Model of Thriving.
Abstract
We report on a process of coproducing a theory of thriving for people living with financial hardship involving collaboration between people with relevant lived experience, practitioners from the UK national charity Turn2us, and academics.
We explain why coproduction is desirable for developing legitimate, context-sensitive, and rich understandings of thriving, and how the practice can undergird wellbeing public policy more broadly.
We detail the methodology involved, illustrating it with our own practice and the conceptualisation of thriving that it produced, and demonstrating that it is not just desirable but also feasible. While the theory of thriving we arrived at bears similarities to many established theories of wellbeing, it goes beyond them in some ways.
It also emphasises specific items that can inform policy for people experiencing financial hardship in a general wellbeing theories could not. Furthermore, coproduction revealed that ‘off-the-shelf’ measures of wellbeing can be rendered ineffective by contextual factors.
This highlights the need to involve coproduction not just in conceptualising wellbeing and similar concepts but also in the design of wellbeing metrics.
The Many Dimensions of Wellbeing Project is funded by AHRC and ESRC, and is a collaboration with the What Works Centre for Wellbeing.
