The pan-culturality of well-being: But how does culture fit into the equation?

This essay addresses the question of how best to do culturally sensitive research on social processes. This research aims to assess models for individual outcomes that hold across cultural groups but are moderated by cultural factors. Such research requires that social scientists identify and metricize cultural factors, like socialization goals, that have a face-valid connection to these social processes. Relevant indigenous constructs need to be operationalized and included in our models to ensure their widest possible applicability. I argue that well-being is a pan-culturally relevant and important outcome of scientific interest in any cultural context. Conflating its study with that of happiness is confusing, however, since happiness is a separate individual outcome and but one component of a satisfying life. Other components of the good life, like doing one's duty, may be introduced and incorporated into a general equation with other such concepts to assess their validity in predicting well-being. Culturally salient concepts of indigenous origin may thereby be introduced into a multicultural scientific discourse and the distinctiveness of any particular cultural system for its members depicted by the profile of beta weights attached to the constructs in the pan-cultural equation predicting well-being.