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C O N N E C T E D N O R T H : A J O U R N E Y O F T R A N S F O R M AT I O N & W E L L- B E I N G 15 5. Frameworks for Understanding Well-Being Connected North is distinguished from other distance education programs by placing emphasis on promoting Well- Being as a primary outcome. This emphasis on Well-Being is rooted in a variety of frameworks comprising traditional First Nations knowledge and academic science. Although the process of Well-Being promotion is more widely understood, the specific outcome of Well-Being is much less so. Well-Being: A look at the research Well-Being is a widely used, yet poorly operationalized term within the scientific literature. Although agreement on a definition of Well-Being has not been achieved, there is widespread agreement that it is not a single 'thing' but a multi-dimensional construct. Some of the difficulty with defining and measuring Well-Being is that it is tied to many other concepts such as health, functioning, happiness, and flourishing and that these are also difficult to measure. Historically, research on Well-Being focused on one of two approaches called the hedonistic and eudemonic tradition. The hedonistic tradition emphasized happiness, mood, and satisfaction while the eudemonic tradition focused more on psychological development and functioning. A historical review of the literature by Dodge and colleagues (2012) provides a look at the different ways in which the concept of Well-Being has been understood and the gaps that still exist in developing a definition. What can we learn from the work that has been done and how can we use it to inform how we look at Connected North? Taking the hedonistic approach to Well-Being, some have sought to connect Well-Being to another well-known concept: quality of life. The World Health Organization focused on quality of life as an outcome of interest in its work (linking it to health), connecting an individual's perception of the world with the cultural and value systems they are exposed to in their life. The WHO defines quality of life as "a broad-ranging concept affected in a complex way by the person's physical health, psychological state, personal beliefs, social relationships and their relationship to salient features of their environment" (World Health Organization, 2001). Among the difficulties with this approach to defining Well-Being is that quality of life is also poorly defined like many definitions of what makes someone 'healthy'. In the eudemonic tradition, psycho-social functioning has been one of the areas of concentration. Functioning is typically better suited to measurement as there are many observable measures of functioning available that can be drawn on for evaluation.

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