Culturally Sensitive Dimensions of Subjective Wellbeing Linked to Objective Measures: A Narrative Review

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript addresses an important and timely topic: the cultural sensitivity of subjective wellbeing frameworks and their linkage with objective indicators relevant to public health. The general argument—that Western-derived wellbeing frameworks should not simply be translated and applied across cultural groups without careful conceptual, linguistic and psychometric validation—is relevant for public health, psychology, behavioural science, health promotion and policy-making.

However, in its current form, the manuscript has substantial methodological, conceptual and presentation problems. I recommend major revision before the manuscript can be reconsidered for publication.

The first and most important issue concerns the type of review being conducted. The title and manuscript describe the article as a “Narrative Review”, but the abstract states that the studies were identified “following systematic review”, and the methods section refers to a “systematic, PRISM approached” search. This is not a minor wording issue; it affects the methodological credibility of the whole paper. If the manuscript is intended to be a narrative review, the authors should remove the implication that PRISMA or systematic review standards were followed. If it is intended to be a systematic review, the manuscript needs a protocol or registration statement, a PRISMA flow diagram, reproducible search strategies, transparent screening procedures, explicit reasons for exclusion, and a clear risk-of-bias or quality appraisal approach.

Second, there is also a conceptual inconsistency between hypotheses and research questions. The methods section states that “Hypothesis formulation for testing occurred prior to screening”, but the manuscript is structured around two research questions rather than explicit, testable hypotheses. No hypotheses are clearly stated, operationalized or statistically tested. The authors should clarify whether this is a hypothesis-driven review, a question-driven narrative synthesis, or a systematic/scoping review. The terminology should be made consistent throughout the manuscript.

Third, there is a serious inconsistency in the number of included studies. The abstract refers to “Thirty peer-reviewed studies”, while the methods section states that 52 papers were included. The results section then appears to summarize 21 subjective wellbeing examples in Tables A1 and A2, plus nine examples linking subjective and objective measures in Table A3, which again suggests 30 studies. The authors must clarify whether the review included 30 studies, 52 papers, or another number. They should clearly distinguish between records identified, papers screened, full texts assessed, studies included in the synthesis, studies included in the tables, and background/theoretical references.

Fourth, the screening process is not reproducible. The manuscript reports very large numbers of search outputs, including 355, 17,900, 160 and 2,460 results to screen, but it does not explain how these records were reduced to the included studies. Manually screening 17,900 records is possible only if the procedure is described in much greater detail. The absence of a flow diagram, explicit exclusion reasons and reproducible screening stages makes it difficult to assess the completeness and reliability of the review.

Fifth, the quality assessment appears to have been conducted by a single reviewer. This may be acceptable for a narrative review if clearly acknowledged as a limitation, but it substantially weakens the strength of the conclusions. If the authors wish to retain stronger claims about the adequacy or inadequacy of the included studies, they should either include a second reviewer, report inter-rater agreement, or explicitly frame the appraisal as a single-author interpretive assessment.

Sixth, the Results section reads more as a descriptive enumeration of individual studies than as a genuine synthesis. The manuscript often moves from one framework or country example to another without sufficiently integrating patterns, contradictions, methodological limitations or theoretical implications across studies. The authors should strengthen the synthesis by identifying clear themes, comparing groups of studies, explaining convergences and divergences, and showing how the evidence answers each research question.

Seventh, the manuscript repeatedly promotes General Procrustes Analysis as a possible way forward for cross-cultural comparison of wellbeing profiles. This is an interesting proposal, but it is not applied to any data in the manuscript. At present, the discussion of GPA reads more like a methodological recommendation than a finding derived from the review. The authors should either substantially reduce and reframe this claim as a speculative future direction, or provide a clearer methodological demonstration using suitable data. The manuscript should also explain how GPA would compare with other cross-cultural psychometric approaches, such as measurement invariance testing, multi-group confirmatory factor analysis, item response theory, differential item functioning, alignment methods, latent profile analysis or mixed-method comparative approaches.

Eighth, the conceptual framework requires clarification. Terms such as “culture”, “cultural group”, “subjective wellbeing”, “objective wellbeing”, “wellness”, “happiness”, “hedonic wellbeing” and “eudaimonic wellbeing” are sometimes used in overlapping ways. The manuscript would be strengthened by offering precise definitions and by distinguishing more carefully between national culture, ethnicity, language, religion, age cohort, Indigenous status, migration status, socioeconomic context and environmental vulnerability.

Ninth, the psychometric evaluation needs greater rigor. The manuscript frequently states that models were “statistically inadequate” or that validity and reliability were “adequate”, but the criteria for these judgments are not sufficiently transparent. The authors should specify which forms of validity and reliability were considered, what standards were used, and how each study was judged. More attention should also be given to measurement invariance, response styles in Likert scales, translation/back-translation limitations, linguistic equivalence, conceptual equivalence and metric equivalence.

Tenth, the tables contain useful material but require substantial revision. Tables A1–A3 are dense and difficult to read. Some entries use imprecise labels such as “yes, but see relevance”, which is not sufficiently informative. The authors should standardize the appraisal categories, simplify the wording, correct typographical errors, and consider moving less essential information to supplementary material while improving the narrative synthesis in the main text.

Eleventh, the manuscript requires careful editing of English language and terminology. There are several errors and inconsistencies, including “PRISM” instead of “PRISMA”, “breath” instead of “breadth”, “Tabe”, “Columbia” instead of “Colombia”, inconsistent use of “Malaya” and “Malaysia”, and inconsistent use of “eudemonic” and “eudaimonic”. These issues affect readability and professional presentation.

Twelfth, the references and citation details need careful checking. There appear to be discrepancies between years cited in the text and years listed in the references, for example around Marsh 2020/2026 and the Japanese PWBS reference, which is discussed as 2022 in the text but appears as 2020 in the reference list. The authors should carefully verify all references, author names, years, journal details and DOIs. In particular, several DOI formats appear unusual or potentially inconsistent with the bibliographic information provided, including entries with DOI prefixes and year patterns such as 10.1007/s11482-026-… and 10.1007/s10834-026-…. These may be correct, but they should be explicitly checked against the publishers’ records or Crossref.

Finally, several conclusions should be moderated. The overall position of the manuscript is plausible and important, but some claims are too broad given the current review method and the small, heterogeneous set of included studies. The manuscript should more clearly distinguish between conclusions directly supported by the reviewed evidence and broader interpretive or speculative claims.

Overall, the topic is relevant and potentially suitable for IJERPH. However, the current version needs major methodological clarification, correction of internal inconsistencies, stronger psychometric framing, a clearer synthesis, reduced speculation around GPA, careful reference and DOI checking, and substantial English-language editing before it can be reconsidered for publication.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The manuscript requires substantial English-language editing before publication. In several sections, the meaning is understandable but not expressed with sufficient clarity or fluency for a scientific article. There are grammatical problems, awkward sentence structures, inconsistent terminology, and several typographical or wording errors. Examples include “PRISM” instead of “PRISMA”, “breath” instead of “breadth”, “Tabe”, inconsistent use of “eudemonic/eudaimonic”, and inconsistent geographical terminology such as “Columbia/Colombia” and “Malaya/Malaysia”. These issues affect readability and should be corrected through careful professional language editing.

Author Response

Hello Reviewer 1,

Please see attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This manuscript deals with a very important and timely topic. I applaud the author’s effort of summarizing a sparse and variegated set of papers, widely varying in conceptual depth, type of selected variables and methodological quality.

Besides this effort, however, it would be interesting to read a more articulated set of comments concerning the presence vs absence of a solid theoretical background for each scale. Except for Ryff’s scales and some of the indigenous measures, in most of the reviewed publications it is difficult to detect the conceptual rationale guiding the specific instrument development and interpretation of related findings.

Unfortunately, in the domain of well-being there is a widespread tendency to assemble items and dimensions in more or less long scales, ignoring or only poorly describing the availability of a sufficiently strong conceptual background guiding item choice and scale well-being. The present review describes various instruments including some recurrent dimensions (e.g. meaning, happiness, life satisfaction) in combination with other ones, more or less similar to those included in other scales; these scales have different names and structure, but often there is no theoretical model guiding item selection. I think that this is an important point to be raised: assembling disparate items to capture the biggest possible number of dimensions without a strong conceptual rationale leads to collection of a lot of data without a logic, or – even worse – to a “a posteriori” logic – the HARKing approach.

The review could include an additional result subsection, addressing this issue in relation to the reviewed measures. Moreover, the discussion could integrate contributions by scholars who (a) have adopted a bottom-up approach leading to the detection of cross-culturally shared constructs (e.g. Delle Fave et al., 2016) or of cultural differences in item understanding (Brailovskaia et al., 2022), or (b) designed conceptual models in the attempt to investigate subjective well-being from a more universal, culture-fair lens (e.g. Krys et al, 2024; Zhao, 2025; Agrawal et al, 2025), or (c) investigated indigenous constructs on the basis of theoretically defined cultural models (Leung et al,, 2016; Nwoye, 2018)

References

Agrawal, S., Sharma, N., Agrawal, R., Iazzolino, G., & Bruni, M.E. (2025). Beyond GDP: A Triple Helix Framework for a Happiness Economy. Social Indicators Research, 179, 67–94. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-025-03604-y

Brailovskaia, J., Lin, M., Scholten, S. Zhu, M., Fu, Y., Shao, M., Hu, S., Li, X., Guo, W., Cai, D., Lu, S., & Margraf, J. (2022). A qualitative cross-cultural comparison of well-being constructs: The meaning of happiness, life satisfaction, and social support for German and Chinese students. Journal of Happiness Studies, 23, 1379–1402. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-021-00454-6

Delle Fave, A., Brdar, I., Wissing, M. P., Araujo, U., Castro Solano, A., Freire, T., Hernández-Pozo, M. D. R., Jose, P., Martos, T., Nafstad, H. E., Nakamura, J., Singh, K., & Soosai-Nathan, L. (2016). Lay definitions of happiness across nations: The primacy of inner harmony and relational connectedness. Frontiers in Psychology, 7. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00030

Krys, K., Kostoula, O., van Tilburg, W. A. P., Mosca, O., Lee, J. H., Maricchiolo, F., Kosiarczyk, A., Kocimska-Bortnowska, A., Torres, C., Hitokoto, H., Liew, K., Bond, M. H., Lun, V. M.-C., Vignoles, V. L., Zelenski, J. M., Haas, B. W., Park, J., Vauclair, C.-M., Kwiatkowska, A., … Uchida, Y. (2024). Happiness maximization is a WEIRD way of living. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 20(5), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916231208367

Leung, K., Wang, J., & Deng, H. (2016). How can indigenous research contribute to universal knowledge? An illustration with research on interpersonal harmony. Japanese Psychological Research, 58(1), 110–124. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpr.12086

Nwoye, A. (2018). African psychology and the emergence of the Madiban tradition. Theory & Psychology, 28(1), 38–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354317742204

Zhao, M. Y. (2025). Harmony: towards a unified conceptual framework. The Journal of Positive Psychology, Epub ahead of print. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2025.2500564

Author Response

Hello Reviewer 2.

Please find attached replies to your most valuable comments. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf