Insights

A free wellbeing survey you can run at your next community meeting

Five questions, a suggested fifteen minutes, no cost

By Global Wellbeing Institute

Imagine a room of neighbors at a monthly meeting: a church hall, a library room, a tenants' association. Before the agenda starts, everyone gets a slip of paper with five short statements and a pencil. A few minutes later the slips are in a box. By the end of the evening, the group has something it rarely has: a plain picture of how the people who chose to take part say they have been feeling.

That is not a future wish. The tool for it already exists, it is free to use for non-commercial purposes, and anyone can pick it up.

What it is

The WHO-5 Well-Being Index is a five-item questionnaire about how a person has felt over the last two weeks. In 2024, the World Health Organization republished it as an open-access product under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO). Under that licence you may copy, share and adapt it for non-commercial purposes, as long as you cite it properly (World Health Organization, The World Health Organization-Five Well-Being Index (WHO-5), Geneva, 2024, PDF).

Suggested citation, as WHO gives it: "World Health Organization. The World Health Organization-Five Well-Being Index (WHO-5). Geneva: World Health Organization; 2024. License: CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO." Put it at the bottom of your handout.

A few rules of the licence matter. Your use must not suggest that WHO endorses your organization or event, and the WHO logo may not be used. If you adapt the form, the adaptation must carry the same or an equivalent licence, and if you make a translation it must carry WHO's translation disclaimer (printed in the WHO document). Whether your particular use counts as non-commercial depends on your situation, so check WHO's terms at who.int/copyright before you start, especially if the survey is connected to paid services.

The five statements

Participants are asked how often each statement describes how they have felt over the last two weeks. For each one they choose from six options:

  • All of the time (5)
  • Most of the time (4)
  • More than half of the time (3)
  • Less than half of the time (2)
  • Some of the time (1)
  • At no time (0)

The five statements are:

  1. I have felt cheerful and in good spirits.
  2. I have felt calm and relaxed.
  3. I have felt active and vigorous.
  4. I woke up feeling fresh and rested.
  5. My daily life has been filled with things that interest me.

Use the questions exactly as WHO prints them. If you reword them, you can no longer say you are using the standard WHO-5.

How to score it

Add the five numbers. The raw total runs from 0 to 25. Multiply by 4 to get a score from 0 to 100, where higher means better mental well-being. It is a scale score, not a percentage of people who are well.

WHO notes that a percentage score below 50 (or a raw score below 13) "has been suggested as a cut-off for poor mental well-being and as an indication for further assessment for the possible presence of a mental health condition (e.g., depressive disorder)." A low score is a reason to check in and point toward support. It does not establish a diagnosis, and a paper slip at a meeting is not a clinical assessment.

Because the survey is anonymous, you cannot follow up with any one person. Instead, let everyone score their own slip privately if they wish, and make sure everyone knows where to find support.

Why it is reasonable to use in a community

In July 2025, Sören Kliem and colleagues published a study in Frontiers in Psychology (volume 16, article 1592614, 29 July 2025, link). Using survey data collected in 2021 from 2,515 people aged 16 and older in Germany, they reported strong measurement properties for the WHO-5, scores that could be compared across the male/female and age groups tested, and updated German population norms by age group. The authors say the norms support using the WHO-5 for population-based prevention and mental health care planning.

The study has limits. Its response rate was 42.6%, which leaves a risk that the people who answered differ from those who did not. The authors also describe limited generalizability to clinical samples and other countries. So this is evidence that the tool measures reliably in a large German general-population sample. It does not say how any particular neighborhood will score, those German norms should not be treated as benchmarks for your community, and it does not show that running a survey improves anyone's wellbeing.

A suggested 15-minute activity

These timings are our suggestions, not study findings. Allow extra time for preparation, scoring and discussion.

Before the meeting (about 5 minutes)

  • Use the questionnaire on printed page 1 of the linked 2024 WHO document, retaining its two-week instructions, all five items, all six labelled response options and the WHO credit/licence notice. Add the suggested citation and support information without changing the questionnaire.
  • Do not collect names, email addresses or phone numbers. Put a box or envelope by the door.
  • Print a support line on the sheet. In the US: "Call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org, any time, day or night" (the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline). Elsewhere, use your local equivalent.
  • If you use an online form instead of paper, check what the form tool records about devices and IP addresses before telling people it is anonymous.

At the meeting (about 10 minutes)

  • Say it plainly: "This is voluntary and anonymous. Skip it if you like. We will only look at the group's overall numbers."
  • Give people two to three minutes to answer.
  • Before collecting slips, let participants calculate and keep a private note of their own score if they wish; provide everyone with support information. Then collect the slips.
  • This plan is for adults. Work with an appropriately qualified professional on any survey involving minors, including age-appropriate instruments and applicable consent and safeguarding requirements.

After the meeting

  • For the group summary, use complete five-item responses, state how many were included, and do not treat unanswered items as zero.
  • Report only the group's average and spread, never an individual result.
  • Small groups can identify people. A suggested practice, which is ours and not WHO's, is not to report any subgroup of fewer than about 10 people. It reduces the risk but does not guarantee anonymity. If the whole group is small, hold back the average and spread too.
  • Do not file scores with any person's record.
  • Describe results as those of the people who took part. A meeting is a convenience sample, so it is not a measure of the whole community.
  • Share the group result at the next meeting, along with what the group wants to do about it.

Use it for conversation, not for labels

You can repeat the survey later to support another conversation. Be careful here: if different people attend each time, a change in the average does not show that anyone got better, or that any program worked. Cut-offs vary by population and purpose, so resist using the number to label anyone. The question to ask afterward is simple: what would make the next two weeks feel better for people here?

One more reason to use the standard form

Researchers keep testing how the WHO-5 travels across ages and languages. A school study in Japan, published in December 2025, received 6,983 questionnaires from students aged 10 to 15 and tested age-adapted five- and four-item versions with simplified response options. It is a reminder that tools for young people and for other languages need their own adaptation and testing, and that standard adult scoring should not be assumed to apply to them. (Frontiers in Public Health 13:1662332, 10 December 2025, link.)

Where this fits for GIHEW

GIHEW's programs are in development, and we are not reporting program results. This article offers a practical introduction to WHO-5. To learn about our plans, request the GIHEW prospectus or talk to us about the first cohort.

Sources

Global Wellbeing Institute is a new organization and its programs are in development. We do not report program results.