Rights and licensing
This file records how the Workplace Wellbeing Question Bank was built, the licence status of each primary source, and where permission would be required before wording could be rendered. No permission requests have been made; nothing in this dataset depends on one. It is the authoritative rights record for the dataset and the site.
Content policy. This resource publishes only from the public commons: public-survey items with verified wording, provenance and licence status, and openly licensed guidance written for this bank. It is vendor-neutral by rule. It carries no marker of which items any implementer selects, schedules or scores, and no implementer's internal analysis appears here. Notes on how specific editorial choices honour this policy are at the end of this page.
What this resource is
The Workplace Wellbeing Question Bank is a resource maintained under the Open Workplace Health Standard. It is distinct from the normative OWHS specification. Its topic groupings are an editorial convenience for browsing; they are not the OWHS construct-domain codelist, which is normative and changes only by RFC.
Rebuild-not-republish protocol
The bank was built from primary sources, not republished from any secondary compilation. Prior public compilations, including the archived What Works Centre for Wellbeing Workplace Wellbeing Question Bank (July 2020), informed coverage only: which topics from the commons are worth including. They did not inform arrangement. The grouping and ordering here are our own, grounded in widely used public frameworks, and reproduce no prior document's selection or arrangement. No guidance prose from any prior compilation was reused, and no item wording was copied from one. All guidance text on the site and in this repository is written fresh.
An item carries wording on the site only when both of these are true: the wording has been verified verbatim against the primary source, and that source is openly licensed for redistribution in an open-standard context. Where either condition is not met, the item is catalogued with full provenance and no wording, and it is marked unverified. Nothing is paraphrased. An item either carries its exact source wording or it carries none. This is deliberate: a catalogue that quietly rewords instruments is worse than useless, because it looks authoritative while corrupting the measure.
Per-source licence audit
The table records, for each primary source, the licence status recorded in the dataset and whether wording from that source is rendered on the site in this release.
| Source | Licence status recorded | Rendered in v0.1 | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| ONS personal well-being (Annual Population Survey) | OGL | Yes (4 items) | Crown copyright, Open Government Licence v3.0. Reproduced with attribution. |
| Civil Service People Survey | OGL | No | Crown copyright, OGL. Wording not yet verified verbatim in this release. |
| Financial Capability Survey (MaPS) | OGL | No | Open Government Licence. Wording not yet verified verbatim. |
| European Working Conditions Survey (Eurofound) | Eurofound | No | Eurofound reuse with attribution. Wording not yet verified verbatim. |
| European Quality of Life Survey (Eurofound) | Eurofound | No | Eurofound reuse with attribution. Wording not yet verified verbatim. |
| European Social Survey | ESS | No | ESS terms, attribution, non-commercial research use. Wording not yet verified verbatim. |
| Understanding Society (ISER, Essex) | permission required; none requested | No | Redistribution of item wording to be confirmed with ISER. |
| Skills and Employment Survey | permission required; none requested | No | Redistribution of item wording to be confirmed with the study team. |
| NHS Staff Survey | NHS | No | Structure and citation only; item text withheld; permission would be required and none has been requested. |
| WHO-5 Well-Being Index | WHO CC BY-NC-SA | No | CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO. Referenced with its notice and a link; item text not reproduced. |
| PERMA-Profiler | permission required; none requested | No | Author permission required; referenced by provenance, linked out. |
| OECD Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well-being | permission required; none requested | No | OECD terms to be confirmed before any wording is rendered. |
| WELL Building Standard (IWBI) | permission required; none requested | No | Proprietary standard; referenced by provenance only. |
Notes on specific sources
- ONS-4. The four ONS personal well-being questions (life satisfaction, worthwhile, happiness, anxiety) are Crown copyright under the Open Government Licence v3.0 and are reproduced here with attribution. Earlier compilations often omitted the anxiety item; it is completed here so the ONS-4 set is whole. Current published UK benchmarks (year ending March 2023) are attached to each of the four, cited to the ONS bulletin.
- WHO-5. Published under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO. Rather than reproduce the five items, this release references the instrument, records its licence, and links to the WHO page. This keeps the catalogue clear of the non-commercial and share-alike conditions in a context where downstream reuse is mixed.
- NHS Staff Survey. Items are recorded by structure and citation only. No item text is included until permission status is confirmed.
Courtesy enquiries (gating nothing)
No catalogued item's rights depend on Nottingham Trent University (NTU) or CEPREMAP. Zero items in this dataset attribute to either. Any outreach to them is a succession courtesy to the community around the archived 2020 bank and to adjacent workplace well-being measurement work, not a rights requirement. These enquiries gate nothing: no item is held back, downgraded, or excluded on their account, and the release does not wait on a reply.
- Nottingham Trent University (NTU). Optional courtesy contact regarding prior workplace well-being measurement work. No item depends on it.
- CEPREMAP (Centre pour la recherche economique et ses applications, Paris). Optional courtesy contact regarding prior well-being measurement work. No item depends on it.
If a future release adds an item whose primary source resolves to either, that item's licence status and render flag will be set from that source's own terms, recorded here, and noted in the changelog.
Licences for our additions
- Guidance text (all prose written for this bank, on the site and in this repository): Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
- Dataset structure (the schema, field definitions, topic-group arrangement, and record structure, independent of any item wording): Apache License 2.0.
- Item wording is not ours to license. It remains with each primary source under the licence recorded in that item's
copyright_statusfield.
This dual arrangement matches the wider Open Workplace Health Standard repository pattern: openly reusable prose under CC BY 4.0, openly reusable structure under Apache 2.0, and third-party content left under its own terms with provenance recorded.
Content policy notes
- Topic groupings. The bank groups items into 13 editorial topic groups, arranged from public frameworks (the HSE Management Standards plus ONS and OECD outcome practice). They are deliberately not the OWHS construct-domain codelist, which changes only by RFC, and they are not any implementer's internal domain mapping.
- Item selection. The catalogue lists public-survey items from the commons. It carries no flag, ordering tell, or example indicating which items any implementer selects, schedules or scores. Which items any product uses is not derivable from this resource.
- ONS-4 wording. Reproduced verbatim under the Open Government Licence v3.0, with attribution, as the licence permits.