ANALYSIS ON SOCIAL WELL-BEING INDICATORS: A CASE STUDY OF KETENGAH DISTRICT IN MALAYSIA

Abstract

Social well-being is a multidimensional construct reflecting the quality of life experienced by individuals and families across economic, housing, educational, health, safety and community dimensions. Although Malaysia has formulated the Family Well-Being Index (FWBI) to track these dimensions on the national level, limited research has examined on how the framework can be localized in the semi-rural settings. This paper uses the FWBI domains to examine the social well-being within the Central Terengganu Development Authority (KETENGAH) region, a predominantly semi-rural development region. Data were collected through a household survey supplemented by focus group discussions and interviews. To investigate the relationship between socio-economic characteristics and well-being scores, the mixed-methods methodology was used: descriptive statistics (the profiling of respondents), Relative Importance Index (RII) to compare satisfaction across indicators and correlation analysis to assess the relationship. The findings identified lower satisfaction in several economic and infrastructural areas, particularly income adequacy, environmental services, transportation, and digital connectivity. Spearman’s rho analysis further identified statistically significant but generally weak-to-moderate associations between selected socioeconomic characteristics and well-being indicators. The findings demonstrate that national well-being frameworks should be adjusted to local settings and offer policy-relevant implications to enhance social well-being in semi-rural Malaysia.