Jul 20, 2026 · 45 min · 10 segments
In this special episode of Researching Happy, recorded at the European Conference on Positive Psychology in Dublin, Matthew Iasiello from Be Well Co and the University of Adelaide explores one of the…
Matthew IasielloGuest
I'm from Adelaide University, and I'm also from this funding organization called Be Well Co.
And we're a sort of a translational research team, but we're really focused on translating research into practice.
And I think it's a really nice place to be where we sort of have one foot in the research world and one foot in the real world, because we're faced with all these challenges that people in the community tell us.
Most of the times it's us trying to communicate wellbeing science and they're kind of pointing out like big holes in what we're saying.
And Camp Quality, we're a social enterprise owned by a large Australian charity, which is called Camp Quality.
So it's a nice place to be where we can generate sort of research consultancy, and we do a lot of training, and then profits kick up to the charity.
in a sense conversational, because I do want to take a little bit of pause to just see whether this is making sense to you, to see whether you agree or what you think about it, basically.
So what I want to do is cover off on what I think is the problem, this idea that we have inconsistent definitions of measures of well-being across disciplines, but even within our discipline as well.
Basically, any time you go and you say in a research article, we did X to wellbeing, we have really no idea what that means until you go down to the measurements in the paper itself, and it could be absolutely anything.
Why this matters, there's fragmentation which undermines research synthesis, intervention design and policy, and probably I would say as well, sort of undermines the credibility of the field and actually just the messaging of when this eventually trickles down to the community, who knows what message they've got about wellbeing.
I want to talk about a possible solution, and I really want to emphasize possible here.
It's to think about can we develop a taxonomy to bring conceptual clarity, which doesn't become a prison cell.
So this idea, or a jail cell, this idea that we become so prescriptive with our definitions of what is well-being that it actually doesn't allow for context and for nuance.
I'll present a bit of our work to date, a Delphi study that was recently published.
And like I say, this tension of sort of standardizing without losing cultural nuance or stifling innovation.
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I'm from Adelaide University, and I'm also from this funding organization called Be Well Co.
And we're a sort of a translational research team, but we're really focused on translating research into practice.
And I think it's a really nice place to be where we sort of have one foot in the research world and one foot in the real world, because we're faced with all these challenges that people in the community tell us.
Most of the times it's us trying to communicate wellbeing science and they're kind of pointing out like big holes in what we're saying.
And Camp Quality, we're a social enterprise owned by a large Australian charity, which is called Camp Quality.
So it's a nice place to be where we can generate sort of research consultancy, and we do a lot of training, and then profits kick up to the charity.
in a sense conversational, because I do want to take a little bit of pause to just see whether this is making sense to you, to see whether you agree or what you think about it, basically.
So what I want to do is cover off on what I think is the problem, this idea that we have inconsistent definitions of measures of well-being across disciplines, but even within our discipline as well.
Basically, any time you go and you say in a research article, we did X to wellbeing, we have really no idea what that means until you go down to the measurements in the paper itself, and it could be absolutely anything.
Why this matters, there's fragmentation which undermines research synthesis, intervention design and policy, and probably I would say as well, sort of undermines the credibility of the field and actually just the messaging of when this eventually trickles down to the community, who knows what message they've got about wellbeing.
I want to talk about a possible solution, and I really want to emphasize possible here.
It's to think about can we develop a taxonomy to bring conceptual clarity, which doesn't become a prison cell.
So this idea, or a jail cell, this idea that we become so prescriptive with our definitions of what is well-being that it actually doesn't allow for context and for nuance.
I'll present a bit of our work to date, a Delphi study that was recently published.
And like I say, this tension of sort of standardizing without losing cultural nuance or stifling innovation.
