Clarifying the concept of psychological richness: Is it a dimension of subjective well-being?

This paper queries the claim of a series of recent publications that “psychological richness” (PR) is a coherent concept and a dimension of subjective well-being. Our argument is that psychological richness has merit, but a great deal more theoretical exposition is required to effectively conceptualise, measure, and study it. In particular, the value-laden relationship between psychological richness and wellbeing needs to be thoroughly theorised. Cognitive interviewing or similar qualitative methods are also required to understand what respondents understand by PR when responding to psychometric surveys designed to measure it. Until this is done, data from the psychologically rich life questionnaire is hard to interpret and thus has little evidentiary merit. We critique the designs of existing studies that are supposed to validate psychological richness as a dimension of a good life. We also provide a statistical reanalysis of existing data from the psychological rich life questionnaire. Our results suggest that psychological richness is neither a unified construct nor a dimension of subjective well-being. We conclude that we do not presently understand psychological richness and should be cautious about popularising the concept.