Cultures of Wellbeing

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvii

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2. Introduction: The Many Faces of Wellbeing

   1. Introduction: The Many Faces of Wellbeing

      • Sarah C. White

      Pages 1-44

3. Mixed Methods

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 45-45

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   2. Enquiries into Wellbeing: How Could Qualitative Data Be Used to Improve the Reliability of Survey Data?

      • Laura Camfield

      Pages 47-65

   3. Measuring National Wellbeing: What Matters to You? What Matters to Whom?

      • Susan Oman

      Pages 66-94

   4. Staying Well in a South African Township: Stories from Public Health and Sociology

      • Emer Brangan

      Pages 95-117

   5. Economics and Subjectivities of Wellbeing in Rural Zambia

      • Sarah C. White, Viviana Ramirez

      Pages 118-143

   6. ‘The Weight Falls on My Shoulders’: Close Relationships and Women’s Wellbeing in India

      • Shreya Jha, Sarah C. White

      Pages 144-171

4. Qualitative Research

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 173-173

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   2. The Dynamics of Relational Wellbeing in the Context of Mobility in Peru

      • Rebecca Huovinen, Chloe Blackmore

      Pages 175-197

   3. Tensions in Conceptualising Psychosocial Wellbeing in Angola: The Marginalisation of Religion and Spirituality

      • Carola Eyber

      Pages 198-218

   4. Picture This: Visual Explorations of Wellbeing in a Landmine-Contaminated Landscape in Cambodia

      • Gabrielle Davies

      Pages 219-239

   5. Authorised Voices in the Construction of Wellbeing Discourses: A Reflective Ethnographic Experience in Northern Mexico

      • Juan Loera-González

      Pages 240-259

   6. Historical Reconstruction and Cultural Identity Building as a Local Pathway to ‘Living Well’ amongst the Pemon of Venezuela

      • Iokiñe Rodríguez

      Pages 260-280

5. Back Matter

   Pages 281-290

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The authors challenge psychological perspectives on happiness and subjective wellbeing. Highlighting the politics of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, case studies across continents explore wellbeing in relation to health, children and youth, migration, economics, religion, family, land mines, national surveys, and indigenous identities.  

• Happiness
• subjective wellbeing
• psychological wellbeing
• research methods
• international
• cross-cultural
• Africa
• Latin America
• South Asia
• South East Asia
• qualitative methods
• mixed methods
• migration
• Policy
• politics
• qualitative research
• sociology
• development theory
• development policy

“This book … seeks to show that different methodologies not only shed light upon the different aspects of wellbeing but also play an active role in generating a variety of data and analyses which allow the construction of different explanations. … it further emphasizes the importance of the emerging concept of relational well-being, which is a major find that renders this textbook important and necessary to researchers focused in this field of study.” (Walter N. Toscano, Applied Research in Quality of life, Vol. 12, 2017)

'Cultures of wellbeing is an absolute 'must-read' for anyone working on wellbeing. As so often with anthropologically informed research, comparative study opens up the assumptions underpinning policy approaches and emphasises the importance of attending to the specificities of people, places and their histories. This rich volume of case studies engages and refines an approach to wellbeing that offers a serious and significant alternative to the orthodoxies of economics or psychology. All the chapters are written very clearly making the book highly accessible across different disciplines and beyond academia. And the introductory chapter offers one of the most lucid summaries of the state of wellbeing research you could hope to read.' - Sarah Atkinson, Professor of Geography and Medical Humanities, Durham University, UK

• University of Bath, UK

  Sarah C. White, Chloe Blackmore

Emer Brangan, University of Bristol, UK. Laura Camfield, University of East Anglia, UK. Gabrielle Davies, University of Bath, UK. Carola Eyber, Queen Margaret University, UK. Rebecca Huovinen, University of Bath, UK. Shreya Jha, University of Bath, UK. Juan Loera-González University of Sussex, UK. Susan Oman, University of Manchester, UK. Viviana Ramirez, University of Bath, UK. Iokiñe Rodríguez, Venezuela Institute for Scientific Research (IVIC), Venezuela.  

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