ABSTRACT
Well-being is an integrative concept in at least two senses. First, well-being connotes that all levels of organization involved in the ecology of human development combine to support feelings of, self-reflections about, and actual physical and behavioral attributes pertinent to health and positive physiological and behavioral functioning. Well-being connotes then that all these levels act in concert as an integrated or "fused" developmental system (Ford & Lerner, 1992; Lerner, 1998a; Thelen & Smith, 1998). Accordingly, well-being is a holistic notion of the individual or, better, of the "individual-context relational system," and thus involves person-oriented, as compared to variable-oriented, scholarship (Magnusson, 1999a, 1999b; Magnusson & Stattin, 1998). Second, well-being connotes that healthy and positive physiological and behavioral functioning at one point in time are associ-
ated with such functioning at other points in time. To have well-being, the integrated developmental system must be maintained over time.
