Women and other oppressed and deprived people sometimes collude with the forces that perpetuate injustice against them. Women’s acceptance of their lesser claim on household resources like food, ...their positive attitudes toward clitoridectemy and infibulation, their acquiescence to violence at the hands of their husbands, and their sometimes fatalistic attitudes toward their own poverty or suffering are all examples of “adaptive preferences,” wherein women participate in their own deprivation. This book offers a definition of adaptive preference and a moral framework for responding to adaptive preferences in development practice. The book defines adaptive preferences as deficits in the capacity to lead a flourishing human life that are causally related to deprivation and argues that public institutions should conduct deliberative interventions to transform the adaptive preferences of deprived people. It insists that people with adaptive preferences can experience value distortion, but it explains how this fact does not undermine those people’s claim to participate in designing development interventions that determine the course of their lives. The book claims that adaptive preference identification requires a commitment to moral universalism, but this commitment need not be incompatible with a respect for culturally variant conceptions of the good. She illustrates her arguments with examples from real-world development practice. Its deliberative perfectionist approach moves us beyond apparent impasses in the debates about internalized oppression and autonomous agency, relativism and universalism, and feminism and multiculturalism.
A large empirical literature has debated the existence of a U-shaped happiness-age curve. This paper re-examines the relationship between various measures of well-being and age in 145 countries, ...including 109 developing countries, controlling for education and marital and labor force status, among others, on samples of individuals under the age of 70. The U-shape of the curve is forcefully confirmed, with an age minimum, or nadir, in midlife around age 50 in separate analyses for developing and advanced countries as well as for the continent of Africa. The happiness curve seems to be everywhere. While panel data are largely unavailable for this issue, and the findings using such data largely confirm the cross-section results, the paper discusses insights on why cohort effects do not drive the findings. I find the age of the minima has risen over time in Europe and the USA.
•Limiting the frequency of checking email throughout the day reduced daily stress.•Lower daily stress predicts greater well-being (e.g., higher positive affect).•The frequency of checking email did ...not directly impact other well-being outcomes.
Using email is one of the most common online activities in the world today. Yet, very little experimental research has examined the effect of email on well-being. Utilizing a within-subjects design, we investigated how the frequency of checking email affects well-being over a period of two weeks. During one week, 124 adults were randomly assigned to limit checking their email to three times a day; during the other week, participants could check their email an unlimited number of times per day. We found that during the limited email use week, participants experienced significantly lower daily stress than during the unlimited email use week. Lower stress, in turn, predicted higher well-being on a diverse range of well-being outcomes. These findings highlight the benefits of checking email less frequently for reducing psychological stress.
Around the world, governments are starting to directly measure the subjective wellbeing of their citizens and to use it for policy evaluation and appraisal. What would happen if a country were to ...move from using GDP to using subjective wellbeing as the primary metric for measuring economic and societal progress? Would policy priorities change? Would we continue to care about economic growth? What role would different government institutions play in such a scenario? And, most importantly, how could this be implemented in daily practice, for example in policy evaluations and appraisals of government analysts, or in political agenda-setting at the top level? This book provides answers to these questions from a conceptual to a technical level by showing how direct measures of subjective wellbeing can be used for policy evaluation and appraisal, either complementary in the short run or even entirely in the long run. It gives a brief history of the idea that governments should care about the happiness of their citizens, provides theories, makes suggestions for direct measurement, derives technical standards, shows how to conduct wellbeing cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analyses, and gives examples of how real-world policy evaluations and appraisals would change if they were based on subjective wellbeing. In doing so, the book serves the growing interest of governments as well as non-governmental and international organizations in how to put subjective wellbeing metrics into policy practice.
Measuring Well-Being Lee, Matthew T; Kubzansky, Laura D; VanderWeele, Tyler J
05/2021
eBook
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.
This paper discusses what well-being means to caregivers and how it can be measured to confirm its acquisition by using previous research on theoretical and practical aspects.Within the field of ...psychology, the two types of well-being (subjective and psychological well-being) are combined to form "feeling good and functioning well", which refers to "pleasant subjective experiences, meaningful activities and the realization of human potential in an individual's life".On the other hands, a review study reported on the Global Measure of well-being, that is, depressive symptoms, mental health, QOL, satisfaction with life and health, also on caregiver-specific well-being measures that are burden, role strain, personal strain, stress, competence and self-efficacy. The majority of measures focused on the negative aspects of well-being.If there is no simple measurement tool that captures both the positive and negative aspects of well-being, a comprehensive and quantitative evaluation of dementia care, so for the present there is no alternative but to using multiple tools for evaluation.The Eco-map of the Ecological Social Work method, which was used in a psycho-educational intervention for caregivers, was shown to provide a hint as to how to take a macroscopic and comprehensive view of dementia care and how to easily grasp an understanding of the well-being of caregivers.
本稿では，介護者のwell-beingとは何か，またwell-beingの獲得を確認する方法とはどのようなものか，理論と実践，二側面の先行研究を用いて考察した．well-beingとは何かについての回答は，立場によって大きく異なる．哲学的側面では，“amounts to the notion of how well a person's life is going for that ...person”という概念に相当するとされている．しかし，正確さに欠ける懸念もあり，well-beingを定義する際には，定義のStrategy（分析対象・議論領域・定義の方向性），subjective well-beingかpsychological well-beingかのスタンスを検討する必要性がある．そして，心理学領域から，“feeling good and functioning well”“個人の人生における快い主観的な経験，意味・意義のある活動，人間としての可能性を実現する社会的な関係から成る複合的な概念”という定義がなされている．これらの定義の根底にあるのはthe whole human pictureを捉える重要性である．さらに発展させた形態としてWell-beingの構成要素がPERMA（Positive Emotion，Engagement，Relationships，Meaning，Accomplishment）という仮説的定義があり，この構成要素がwell-beingの予測因子になりうるか研究が進められている．一方，介護領域の介入試験のアウトカムで用いた既存尺度の探索Review研究では，1．Global Measure of well-being（Depressive Symptoms・Mental health・QOL・Satisfaction with life・Health），2．Caregiver-Specific Well-being measures（Burden・Role strain・Personal strain/Stress・Competence/self-efficacy）に大別された．そしてDepression，Burdenなどwell-beingのnegativeな側面に焦点化した測定が大半を占めた．この結果は，従来の疾病管理的側面の体験により，Patho-genesis的な志向（健康にとって望ましくない要素・問題を除去し改善することが善）への親和性を示している．認知症介護を巨視的，包括的に捉え，介護者のWell-beingを定量的に評価する簡便な測定ツールが無いとするならば，当面は，複数のツールで評価せざるをえない．測定する内容（種別・項目）を増やすことは，測定対象者（介護者）のQOLを著しく下げることになりかねない．認知症介護を巨視的，包括的に捉え，介護者のwell-being状態を簡便に把握するにはどのようにすればいいのか，その解として，介護者向け心理教育的介入試験で実施したSocial Work手法のEco-mapにヒントがあることを示した．
The significance of measuring children’s well-being has gained prominence in recent years. In Japan, developing self-report scales for children is necessary to address various social problems. This ...study aimed to develop a scale for measuring children’s well-being and examine its reliability and validity. First, the scale items were created using descriptions provided by fifth- and sixth-grade elementary school students. An exploratory factor analysis subsequently revealed that the well-being scale for children comprised three factors and 12 items. Finally, the results from confirmatory factor analysis and correlation analysis with the related concepts of mental health, self-esteem, and social support indicated the scale’s validity.
•This paper investigates empirically the effects of voluntary activities on subjective well-being.•We show that volunteering significantly improves people’s subjective well-being.•The positive ...effects of volunteering are highly heterogeneous along the well-being distribution.•We find evidence of complete subjective well-being adaptation one year after volunteering.•We explore three channels through which volunteering affects subjective well-being.
This paper investigates empirically the effects of voluntary activities on subjective well-being. After controlling for individual fixed effects, we show that volunteering significantly improves people’s subjective well-being. The positive well-being effects of volunteering are highly heterogeneous, with larger impact at the lower end of the distribution of subjective well-being. Our dynamic analysis shows that the beneficial effects of volunteering are transitory. We find evidence of complete subjective well-being adaptation one year after volunteering. We show that more frequent socialisation, increasing satisfaction with feeling part of local community and rising satisfaction with neighbourhood living in are three channels for the contemporaneous positive linkage between volunteering and subjective well-being.
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