scholarly journals Measuring Well-Being

This edited volume explores conceptual and practical challenges in measuring well-being. Given the bewildering array of measures available and ambiguity regarding when and how to measure particular aspects of well-being, knowledge in the field can be difficult to reconcile. Representing numerous disciplines including psychology, economics, sociology, statistics, public health, theology, and philosophy, contributors consider the philosophical and theological traditions on happiness, well-being, and the good life, as well as recent empirical research on well-being and its measurement. Leveraging insights across diverse disciplines, they explore how research can help make sense of the proliferation of different measures and concepts while also proposing new ideas to advance the field. Some chapters engage with philosophical and theological traditions on happiness, well-being, and the good life; some evaluate recent empirical research on well-being and consider how measurement requirements may vary by context and purpose; and others more explicitly integrate methods and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. The final section offers a lively dialogue about a set of recommendations for measuring well-being derived from a consensus of the contributors. Collectively, the chapters provide insight into how scholars might engage beyond disciplinary boundaries and contribute to advances in conceptualizing and measuring well-being. Bringing together work from across often siloed disciplines will provide important insight regarding how people can transcend unhealthy patterns of both individual behavior and social organization in order to pursue the good life and build better societies.

2005 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald P. Strauss ◽  
Carla Fenson

Objective This article is a qualitative approach to understanding how people with craniofacial conditions see quality in their lives and how they understand the components of building a sense of well-being or goodness in their lives. Literary selections from fiction, Web sites, and first-person accounts are examined and categorized into domains and themes to offer some insight into how quality of life is built into the lives of people with craniofacial conditions. Three domains are noted: (1) a personality and psychological domain; (2) a family, work, and social interactive domain; and (3) a cultural and societal domain. Within each domain, a number of themes are noted and discussed. Quotes from affected people and their families are offered to illustrate how they respond to and alter their lives and their world views. Many adults with craniofacial conditions find ways to live with their difference and to succeed using the measures they construct.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 68-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Kowal ◽  
Julie E. Byles

Abstract This paper will highlight current evidence about health and well-being that could encourage investment in health for older populations. The paper uses the example of hypertension throughout to illustrate how data collection efforts are translating research to policy. Hypertension, is a global scourge for poor and wealthy, younger and older adults, increasing the risk of stroke and cardiovascular disease. Although it is easily diagnosed and can be effectively treated the burden of hypertension continues to grow as awareness, prevention and treatment lags, particularly for the poor and old. The focus is brought back to how current research can inform policy for ageing populations in the final section, using Ireland’s experience to demonstrate how to legislate the good life for older adults.


2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 615-618 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary J. Lewis ◽  
Ryota Kanai ◽  
Geraint Rees ◽  
Timothy C. Bates

Utilitas ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 334-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEPHEN M. CAMPBELL

This essay introduces and defends a new analysis of prudential value. According to this analysis, what it is for something to be good for you is for that thing to contribute to the appeal or desirability of being in your position. I argue that this proposal fits well with our ways of talking about prudential value and well-being; enables promising analyses of luck, selfishness, self-sacrifice and paternalism; preserves the relationship between prudential value and the attitudes of concern, love, pity and envy; and satisfies various other desiderata. I also highlight two ways in which the analysis is informative and can lead to progress in our substantive theorizing about the good life.


1996 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-364
Author(s):  
Bi‐Hwan Kim

Joseph Raz Has Long Been Well Known as a Legal philosopher and theorist of practical reason. But it is only in the last decade that he has come to be widely identified as the most prominent defender of a distinctive interpretation of the liberal tradition. Raz wholeheartedly endorses the communitarian view that the individual is a social being, who needs society to establish his/her self-identity and to gain objective knowledge of the good, rather than a self-contained subject abstracted from any specific social experience. Unlike neutralist liberals, such as Rawls and Dworkin, he rejects ‘the priority of right over the good’, stressing the interdependent relationship between right and the good. Yet he remains very much a liberal in his commitment to the value of autonomy (or freedom) and argues powerfully for the desirability (or necessity) of incommensurable plural conceptions of the good life for the well-being of people, as well as for the liberal virtue of toleration, and for their attendant liberal democratic political institutions.


Author(s):  
Mendiola Teng-Calleja ◽  
Jose Antonio R. Clemente ◽  
Ma. Ligaya Menguito ◽  
Donald Jay Bertulfo

Abstract. This study sought to initiate conversations on the utility of the capability approach and a psychological lens in approximating a living wage. We put forth the concept of capability gap – defined as the difference between what one values and what one perceives as attainable. We used a set of valued domains of a good life that were identified based on well-being indicators in determining capability gaps. Five hundred workers (all breadwinners) belonging to households selected through stratified random sampling from purposively chosen middle- and low-income communities in the Philippines participated in the survey. From the data, we constructed a weighted capability measure that determines the capability gap, weighted by the perceived importance of each of the good life domains. We likewise derived an estimate of a living wage that yields a weighted capability that represents individuals' capabilities to achieve and pursue valued outcomes, freedoms, and entitlements. This initial attempt at estimating a living wage based on individuals' capability to achieve and pursue a good life is presented as the main contribution of the research. The limitations of the study as well as its implications to living wage research and policy are discussed.


Waste ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 193-208
Author(s):  
Eiko Maruko Siniawer

With the ever increasing sense in the 1980s that Japan had arrived as an economic power, attention was newly focused on what beyond financial wealth and material abundance constituted an affluent life, on what constituted “true affluence” or an “affluence of the heart.” Affluence—and waste along with it—came to be conceived in more psychological, spiritual, and emotional terms than in the past, with an attention to a well-being and self-fulfillment which extended beyond the purely financial. What was often being sought was yutori, or leisure, relaxation, space, and unconstricted time. Financial and material prosperity made possible self-reflection about what a good life could and should be in an affluent society.


Propelled ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Andreas Elpidorou

The chapter explores the nature of the good life, articulates the role that happiness, pleasure, and positive emotions play in such a life, and considers the effects of emotional adaptation and emotional diversity on our well-being. By drawing upon both philosophical literature and research in social psychology and cognitive neuroscience, it argues for a broad conception of the good life, one that does not identify the good life simply with the presence of positive experiences and the absence of negative ones. The chapter shows not only that negative experiences aren’t detrimental to our well-being, but that they are often necessary to achieve it.


2020 ◽  
pp. 11-48
Author(s):  
Sean Cubitt

Section 1 starts by considering the central notion of this book: a “ecocritique”. The ecocritique recognises that the good life for all includes the well-being of the world we are involved in at every level from the cellular to the cosmic. It is all encompassing. Section 1 then considers how the term “anecdote” relates to ecocritique. Anecdotes provide a peculiarly powerful tool for finding out the meaning of living well, as well as the answering the oft-asked question: who is this “we”? The beauty of anecdotes is that they operate in a non-contemporaneous time. They operate equally well in the past, present, and future. A primary political and ecocritical task of anecdotal method, therefore, is to recognise this hybrid temporality, and to free and maintain its capacity to generate new futures and new pasts.


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