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(da Definition) The concept refers to quality of life (QoL) of individuals engaged in emergency work, either professionally (e.g., health-care workers, fire fighters) or as volunteers. Dimensions of QoL that have been proposed in the literature include PSTD, compassion fatigue, burnout, and compassion satisfaction. Recent perspectives advocate the adoption of a multidimensional approach including both negative and positive outcomes (Stamm, 2005).

(da Definition) Social well-being has been identified by the World Health Organization [WHO] (1948) as a central component of individuals’ overall health. The concept has been conceptualized and operationalized in many different ways. Within economic disciplines, studies have initially operationalized social well-being using objective criteria such as gross domestic product (GDP) that reflects the relative prosperity of communities and societies; more recently, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] (2011) proposed additional criteria, besides macroeconomic statistics, to better measure individuals’ perceptions of well-being and progress. Research within social sciences has operationalized social well-being in terms of behaviors that reflect community and organizational participation, community or group membership, or social capital and social cohesion (Andrews & Withey, 1976; Coleman, 1988; Putnam, 2000).

(da Definition) Sarason (1974) first proposed the concept of psychological sense of community as “the key to the understanding of one’s society’s most pressing problems, the dark side of individualism, manifested in alienation, selfishness and despair” (p. 157). Sarason described it as the feeling that one is part of a readily available, supportive, and dependable structure. He also emphasized that it is difficult to bring the concept into the theoretical and empirical traditions of mainstream psychology because the concept “is not a familiar one in psychology … it does not sound precise, it obviously reflects a value judgment, and does not sound compatible with “hard” science”. Yet, according to Sarason, people knew when they had it and when they didn’t. Inherent in this psychological construction of sense of community are the notions of interdependence, mutual responsibility, and collective consciousness