ONS4 Well-Being Test: How to Read Your Four Ratings
The UK statistics office’s four well-being questions: life satisfaction, worthwhile, happiness and anxiety yesterday, and why each rating is read separately.
What do the four ONS4 questions explore?
The UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) measures personal well-being with four questions rated from 0 to 10: how satisfied you are with your life, whether you feel the things you do are worthwhile, and how happy and how anxious you felt yesterday.
They reflect three ways of describing well-being: an overall judgment about one’s life, the sense that one’s activities are worthwhile, and emotions over a short period.
Why four ratings instead of one score?
The ONS states that it is not appropriate to combine these questions: each describes a different aspect. For satisfaction, worthwhile, and happiness, a higher rating is more favorable. For anxiety, the scale runs the other way: a higher rating means more anxiety.
To present its statistics, the ONS groups ratings into ranges: 0 to 4 low, 5 to 6 medium, 7 to 8 high, and 9 to 10 very high; for anxiety, 0 to 1 very low, 2 to 3 low, 4 to 5 medium, and 6 to 10 high. These ranges are not clinical cutoffs.
Why “yesterday”?
The happiness and anxiety questions ask about yesterday to capture recent emotions rather than distant memories. A single day can be unusual: checking in on another day may give a different picture, without one result being the “right” one.
Make room for your experience
These ratings do not provide a diagnosis or explain the causes of what you are going through. If how you feel concerns you or affects daily life, talk to a professional regardless of the result. Dedicated questionnaires such as the GAD-7 or PHQ-9 are better suited to exploring anxiety or depression symptoms.
Sources and further reading
General information: this content does not provide a diagnosis or treatment recommendation.