J. Allister McGregor

Wellbeing in developing countries: from theory to research

In a world where many experience unprecedented levels of wellbeing, chronic poverty remains a major concern for many developing countries and the international community. Conventional frameworks for understanding development and poverty have focused on money, commodities and economic growth. This 2007 book challenges these conventional approaches and contributes to a new paradigm for development centred on human wellbeing. Poor people are not defined solely by their poverty and a wellbeing approach provides a better means of understanding how people become and stay poor. It examines three perspectives: ideas of human functioning, capabilities and needs; the analysis of livelihoods and resource use; and research on subjective wellbeing and happiness. A range of international experts from psychology, economics, anthropology, sociology, political science and development evaluate the state-of-the-art in understanding wellbeing from these perspectives. This book establishes a new strategy and methodology for researching wellbeing that can influence policy.Introduction: 1. Theorising wellbeing in international development Ian Gough, J. Allister McGregor and Laura Camfield Part I. Human Needs and Human Wellbeing: 2. Conceptualising human needs and wellbeing Des Gasper 3. Basic psychological needs: a self-determination theory perspective on the promotion of wellness across development and cultures Richard Ryan and Aislinn Sapp 4. Measuring freedoms alongside wellbeing Sabina Alkire 5. Using security to indicate wellbeing Geoff Wood 6. Towards a measure of non-economic wellbeing achievement Mark McGillivray Part II. Resources: From Material to Cultural: 7. Wellbeing, livelihoods and resources in social practice Sarah White and Mark Ellison 8. Livelihoods and resource accessing in the Andes: desencuentros in theory and practice Tony Bebbington, Leonith Hinojosa-Valencia, Diego Munoz and Rafael Enrique Rojas Lizarazu 9. Poverty and exclusion, resources and relationships: theorising the links between economic and social development James Copestake Part III. Quality of Life and Subjective Wellbeing: 10. Cross-cultural quality of life assessment: approaches and experiences from the health care field Monika Bullinger and Silke Schmidt 11. Researching quality of life in a developing country: lessons from the South African case Valerie Moller 12. The complexity of wellbeing: a life-satisfaction conception and a domains-of-life approach Mariano Rojas Conclusion. Researching Wellbeing: 13. Researching wellbeing across the disciplines: some key intellectual problems and ways forward Philippa Bevan 14. Researching wellbeing: from concepts to methodology J. Allister McGregor.

The capability approach and the politics of a social conception of wellbeing

The capability approach constitutes a significant contribution to social theory but its potential is diminished by its insufficient treatment of the social construction of meaning. Social meanings enable people to make value judgements about what they will do and be, and also to evaluate how satisfied they are about what they are able to achieve. From this viewpoint, a person’s state of wellbeing must be understood as being socially and psychologically co-constituted in specific social and cultural contexts. In this light, the telos of ‘living well’ which is at the heart of Sen’s version of the capability approach is inadequate and must be modified to a telos of ‘living well together’ which includes consideration of the social structures and institutions which enable people to pursue individual freedoms in relation to others. The policy significance of the capability approach can be further strengthened by paying greater consideration to the political economy of policy decision-making processes and the ways in which conflicts and distributions of power are institutionalized.

Researching Well-Being Communicating between the Needs of Policy Makers and the Needs of People

This article explores the links between conceptions of well-being, the way these are operationalized in empirical research, the knowledge produced and the policy process. The issues researched - poverty, inequality and subjective well-being - are in one sense universal and as such a focus of concerted global policy attention. Yet for people in developing countries around the world they are also a local reality. The argument here is that in researching well-being in a way that is to be policy relevant we must explore the relationships and tensions between global, universalist and local, context-specific analyses. If the global community is intent on effective policy making which can then be implemented to reduce poverty, then it must be founded in local understandings of how poverty is reproduced but this need not be incommensurate with universalist interpretations of these local realities. The article illustrates this using the Bath research programme on Wellbeing in Developing Countries.

Needs and resources in the investigation of well‐being in developing countries: illustrative evidence from Bangladesh and Peru

The paper offers an analysis of how to operationalize the development goal of promoting well‐being, and provides an exemplar. It focuses on one element of a comprehensive methodology to operationalize empirical research into the social and cultural construction of well‐being in developing countries. This research uses a definition of well‐being that combines objective and subjective dimensions and locates these in the social and cultural relationships of particular societies. We focus here on the Resources and Needs Questionnaire (RANQ), a research instrument specifically developed for this work. This explores the relationships between the resources that households command and the levels of needs satisfaction which household members experience. Preliminary analysis of data for Bangladesh and Peru identifies a number of significant relationships between the distribution of resources that households command and the levels of needs satisfaction they achieve. These outcome results then represent a foundation for further analysis using complementary qualitative and process‐oriented data. JEL Classifications: A12, I32, Z1

Surviving and Thriving: Differentiation in a Peri-Urban Community in Northern Albania

In this study, household livelihood strategies in an Albanian village are investigated using income, expenditure and material asset accounts for the villages economy, supplemented by an analysis of qualitative data. Households were divided into thriving; surviving; and struggling categories, and attention focused on how they viewed and interacted with the community, the market and the state. The results indicate the importance of a households material, human and social resource base in determining its success. The widespread disappearance of full-time salaried jobs has especially and adversely affected women: but the social safety net has been crucial in preventing destitution.

A ‘Lost Generation’? Impacts of Complex Compound Crises on Children and Young People

How has the well‐being of children and young people been affected by the global food, fuel and financial crises that have struck since 2007? This article reports empirical findings from qualitative research in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Jamaica, Kenya, Yemen and Zambia in 2009 and 2010. Intended to complement the wider body of mainly quantitative evidence, it explores how the subjective and relational dimensions of human well‐being have been affected as children and families have sought to survive and thrive amidst complex, compound crises, and concludes that monitoring their impacts affords important insights into how these foundational experiences could have enduring consequences in the longer term.

Competing Interpretations: Human Wellbeing and the Use of Quantitative and Qualitative Methods

The renewed focus on human wellbeing in international policy and academic debate encourages us to think again about how quantitative and qualitative methods are combined in understanding development and poverty. During the 2000s the Q- Squared movement provided a wide range of valuable and insightful material that explored the possibilities for and obstacles to combining qualitative and quantitative research methods (Kanbur and Schaffer 2007). Since then a growing number of national and international statistical agencies have recognised the importance of seeking to assess the impacts of governance and public policy in terms of human wellbeing and in doing so they are adopting a hybrid framework that takes account of the objective and subjective dimensions of human wellbeing (OECD 2011; UK ONS 2011). This chapter presents the argument that if development policy and practice is to promote a focus on human wellbeing then it is necessary to consider what types of data are required to do that. The current ‘business as usual’ in international development focuses mainly on material wellbeing and tentatively and occasionally stretches out to encompass human development outcomes (Alkire and Foster 2011). This chapter argues that in order to assess a more holistic conception of human wellbeing (McGregor and Sumner 2010), it is necessary to generate three types of data: objective, subjective and inter-subjective.1 To achieve this, both quantitative and qualitative methods are required and it is necessary to reconsider how these are sequenced and mixed to generate the data.

Reconciling Universal Frameworks and Local Realities in Understanding and Measuring Wellbeing

Many recent initiatives to measure human wellbeing at national and international levels draw on universalist frameworks that propose what human wellbeing consists of. There is also an important counter tendency in this global movement that sees human wellbeing thinking as a place to explore and express differences in cultural and social identities. There is a need for greater clarity about how we might reconcile universalist and localist approaches to wellbeing and this chapter argues that this may be achieved by distinguishing the different public policy and governance purposes that wellbeing measurement initiatives seek to address. The conclusion discusses the dangers of imposing particular universalist conceptions and assuming away critical differences between competing conceptions of wellbeing and methodologies for assessing it.

Wellbeing in Developing Countries: Contents

In a world where many experience unprecedented levels of wellbeing, chronic poverty remains a major concern for many developing countries and the international community. Conventional frameworks for understanding development and poverty have focused on money, commodities and economic growth. This 2007 book challenges these conventional approaches and contributes to a new paradigm for development centred on human wellbeing. Poor people are not defined solely by their poverty and a wellbeing approach provides a better means of understanding how people become and stay poor. It examines three perspectives: ideas of human functioning, capabilities and needs; the analysis of livelihoods and resource use; and research on subjective wellbeing and happiness. A range of international experts from psychology, economics, anthropology, sociology, political science and development evaluate the state-of-the-art in understanding wellbeing from these perspectives. This book establishes a new strategy and methodology for researching wellbeing that can influence policy.Introduction: 1. Theorising wellbeing in international development Ian Gough, J. Allister McGregor and Laura Camfield Part I. Human Needs and Human Wellbeing: 2. Conceptualising human needs and wellbeing Des Gasper 3. Basic psychological needs: a self-determination theory perspective on the promotion of wellness across development and cultures Richard Ryan and Aislinn Sapp 4. Measuring freedoms alongside wellbeing Sabina Alkire 5. Using security to indicate wellbeing Geoff Wood 6. Towards a measure of non-economic wellbeing achievement Mark McGillivray Part II. Resources: From Material to Cultural: 7. Wellbeing, livelihoods and resources in social practice Sarah White and Mark Ellison 8. Livelihoods and resource accessing in the Andes: desencuentros in theory and practice Tony Bebbington, Leonith Hinojosa-Valencia, Diego Munoz and Rafael Enrique Rojas Lizarazu 9. Poverty and exclusion, resources and relationships: theorising the links between economic and social development James Copestake Part III. Quality of Life and Subjective Wellbeing: 10. Cross-cultural quality of life assessment: approaches and experiences from the health care field Monika Bullinger and Silke Schmidt 11. Researching quality of life in a developing country: lessons from the South African case Valerie Moller 12. The complexity of wellbeing: a life-satisfaction conception and a domains-of-life approach Mariano Rojas Conclusion. Researching Wellbeing: 13. Researching wellbeing across the disciplines: some key intellectual problems and ways forward Philippa Bevan 14. Researching wellbeing: from concepts to methodology J. Allister McGregor.

Wellbeing in Developing Countries: Tables

In a world where many experience unprecedented levels of wellbeing, chronic poverty remains a major concern for many developing countries and the international community. Conventional frameworks for understanding development and poverty have focused on money, commodities and economic growth. This 2007 book challenges these conventional approaches and contributes to a new paradigm for development centred on human wellbeing. Poor people are not defined solely by their poverty and a wellbeing approach provides a better means of understanding how people become and stay poor. It examines three perspectives: ideas of human functioning, capabilities and needs; the analysis of livelihoods and resource use; and research on subjective wellbeing and happiness. A range of international experts from psychology, economics, anthropology, sociology, political science and development evaluate the state-of-the-art in understanding wellbeing from these perspectives. This book establishes a new strategy and methodology for researching wellbeing that can influence policy.Introduction: 1. Theorising wellbeing in international development Ian Gough, J. Allister McGregor and Laura Camfield Part I. Human Needs and Human Wellbeing: 2. Conceptualising human needs and wellbeing Des Gasper 3. Basic psychological needs: a self-determination theory perspective on the promotion of wellness across development and cultures Richard Ryan and Aislinn Sapp 4. Measuring freedoms alongside wellbeing Sabina Alkire 5. Using security to indicate wellbeing Geoff Wood 6. Towards a measure of non-economic wellbeing achievement Mark McGillivray Part II. Resources: From Material to Cultural: 7. Wellbeing, livelihoods and resources in social practice Sarah White and Mark Ellison 8. Livelihoods and resource accessing in the Andes: desencuentros in theory and practice Tony Bebbington, Leonith Hinojosa-Valencia, Diego Munoz and Rafael Enrique Rojas Lizarazu 9. Poverty and exclusion, resources and relationships: theorising the links between economic and social development James Copestake Part III. Quality of Life and Subjective Wellbeing: 10. Cross-cultural quality of life assessment: approaches and experiences from the health care field Monika Bullinger and Silke Schmidt 11. Researching quality of life in a developing country: lessons from the South African case Valerie Moller 12. The complexity of wellbeing: a life-satisfaction conception and a domains-of-life approach Mariano Rojas Conclusion. Researching Wellbeing: 13. Researching wellbeing across the disciplines: some key intellectual problems and ways forward Philippa Bevan 14. Researching wellbeing: from concepts to methodology J. Allister McGregor.