Citation

Roy B, Riley C, Herrin J, Spatz ES, Arora A, Kell KP, Welsh J, Rula EY, Krumholz HM. PLoS One 2018; 13(5): e0196720.

Affiliation

Department of Internal Medicine, Section of Cardiovascular Medicine, Yale School of Medicine; Department of Health Policy and Management, Yale School of Public Health; Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, Yale-New Haven Hospital, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Public Library of Science)

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0196720

PMID

29791476

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Well-being is a positively-framed, holistic assessment of health and quality of life that is associated with longevity and better health outcomes. We aimed to identify county attributes that are independently associated with a comprehensive, multi-dimensional assessment of individual well-being.

METHODS: We performed a cross-sectional study examining associations between 77 pre-specified county attributes and a multi-dimensional assessment of individual US residents' well-being, captured by the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index. Our cohort included 338,846 survey participants, randomly sampled from 3,118 US counties or county equivalents.

FINDINGS: We identified twelve county-level factors that were independently associated with individual well-being scores. Together, these twelve factors explained 91% of the variance in individual well-being scores, and they represent four conceptually distinct categories: demographic (% black); social and economic (child poverty, education level [
CONCLUSIONS: Twelve factors across social and economic, clinical care, and physical environmental county-level factors explained the majority of variation in resident well-being.

Language: en