Lía Rodriguez de la Vega

Measuring Quality of Life and Inequalities in South America

This chapter discusses the development of a model to measure quality of life and different forms of inequalities: social, cultural, political, religious, and economic. It emerges as a result of a project conducted by the Research Program on Quality of Life, created in 2004 in the Faculty of Social Sciences, UNICOM and LOMASCyT Universidad Nacional de Lomas de Zamora, Argentina, which has focused on research into quality of life for young people. Our conceptual framework and domains will produce a survey for which a questionnaire will be consistently constructed to measure quality of life and inequalities, by incorporating indicators that respect social, political, economic, religious, and cultural diversities. The core outputs are new, non-traditional quality of life indicators which can be applied to other populations and in other geographical areas, particularly within Latin America.

The Role of Context and Culture in Quality of Life Studies

Culture endures forms in which practices and specific belief systems are implied in social relations and experienced within them. The inclusion of culture by the social actors, leads to the question of identity, regarded as a set of internalized cultural repertoires through which social actors symbolically outline their borders, thus differentiating themselves from the rest of the social actors, in socially structured and historically specific contexts. On the other hand we presume, like that quality of life is a multidimensional phenomenon which involves a variety of elements that refer to human needs whose satisfaction requires material and immaterial elements. Likewise, we believe that the objective and subjective dimensions of life are distinct entities and that people carry out a positive or negative assessment of their life experiences according to what they consider to be good, their conception of it, and of everything that occurs in a specific cultural background, in space and time, the notions of well-being have cultural roots. Considering the above mentioned, this chapter focuses on the notion of culture, the research on the relationship between culture and quality of life, and the impact of culture on the qualitative researcher.

Quality of Life of the Guaraní Community

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Ferdinand Tonnies distinguished two forms of clustering of base: community and society, defining the community as that form of socialization in which subjects, according to their common origin, local proximity or shared values, had attained a degree of implicit consensus. Currently, it can be understood as locality and as a group relationship, emphasizing the first a physical/geographical proximity and the second, interpersonal relationships. Furthermore, considering quality of life, Tonon (2007) points out that its study concerns the material and psychosocial environment, recognizing two areas of well-being: the social and the psychological, the latter referring to the experience and assessment that people make of their situation, including positive or negative findings and a global vision of their life called life satisfaction. Taking into account the above mentioned, the present work considers the Guarani of Salta, self-proclaimed Ava-Guarani, which belongs to the linguistic family of the Tupi Guarani, usually known as Chiriguanos. Originated in the Amazonian jungles, have migrated and settled in the eastern slopes of the Andes, in the current Bolivian departments of Chuquisaca and Tarija, in the Bolivian Chaco (Izozo). It was a migrant population for centuries, in search of farmland for its main food source, corn and cassava. This population could not be conquered by the Incas, but neither exceeded the limits of its borders. Since the eighteenth century, the Franciscan missions settled in almost all their territory, with very few groups beyond their control. To 1919, the missions were secularized, clashed with the Bolivian army, and people were forced to seek work elsewhere while many increased their migration to Argentina where, toward the end of the nineteenth/early twentieth century there was an economic boom in the Northeast, primarily to work in sawmills and sugar mills. The Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay generated other migratory peak toward the Argentine provinces of Salta and Jujuy. Such migration would continue for a long time, corresponding both to individuals and families until recent, always in search of land for crops or different forms of access to monetary income. In this long migration, they were accommodating to various forms of activities as means for their survival. According to the above mentioned, this work intends to analyze the Guarani’s own sense of community and the characteristics of their notion of a good life.

Neighborhood and Housing as Explanatory Scales of Children’s Quality of Life

This article analyzes the work developed with 1062 children aged 8 and 10 – who live in the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in large and small cities – with the aim of measuring two dimensions: housing/home and neighborhood, in conjunction with the variable gender. This analysis will comprise housing/home, the place where they sleep, their home situation, their degree of agreement regarding their homes, and the frequency of family activities – in all cases – according to gender; on the other hand, and in relation to the neighborhood, the level of agreement with its characteristics, and their degree of satisfaction with it, will also – in both cases – be carried out according to gender. Regarding the household where the surveyed boys and girls reside, in general lines, they have given highly positive answers both regarding safety itself and as a form of emotional support; they have likewise given highly positive accounts of how they are heard and looked after by their families – though they show less satisfaction with the space they have to study and do their homework in their dwellings, which points to housing issues. As to their neighborhood of residence, 70% of the 8 year-old surveyed boys and girls express that they are highly satisfied. Regarding 10 year-old boys and girls, the percentage drops to approximately 60%.

Free Time, Friends and Future: A Quality of Life Study with 8 Years Old Children in the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina

The aim of this chapter is to show some results of a project for the study and the measurement of well-being and quality of life of 590 boys and girls of 8 years old, living in the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. We use the International Survey of Children’s Well-Being, with the intention of collecting information on the well-being of boys and girls. In this chapter we will focus on the results obtained for the dimensions: friends, use of free time, more about you and your life, facts of life and the future. The results showed that concerning friendship, 66% of the 8 years old boys and girls indicated to completely agree with respect to the kindness of their friends while 75% said that they have sufficient amount of friends. About the use of free time, half the children carry out after school activities nearly every day, and a quarter of them once or twice a week. About their life, the facts of their life, and their future, 80% totally agree with the lives they lead, while 64,44% express that their lives are completely in accordance with what they want them to be. On the other hand, 86% completely agree to the fact that they have a good life. As to the question of having what they want from life, the percentage is 68%, while 77% assert that their lives are excellent.

A Qualitative Study on Yoga Practice in Quality of Labor Life

Regarding the cultural elements related to India (such as Yoga), they are surrounded by a number of different phenomena: India has undergone one of the largest Diaspora in the world, and its emigrants carry their cultural heritage wherever they go, spreading it in its diversity all over the societies that receive them. This is also found in the propagation of different beliefs, fortified by the context of globalization and strengthened even further by the mass media, as well as by the dynamism of the different places, which involves the market of symbolic property imposed by these movements, thus giving way to a phenomenon known as the New Age, characterized by authors such as Campbell (1997, quoted in Silva da Silveira 2005) within an “orientalization of the Western World”. Thus, yoga practice began to expand from India and has extended all over the world. The access of yoga in Argentina as pointed out by Saizar (2006), took place in the early twentieth century as a practice involving a spiritual pursuit directed to urban sectors of high educational levels and high incomes, who would invite yogis to their homes in order to profit by their teachings on the basic principles and discipline of oriental philosophy. Some of these specialists remained in Argentina and passed on their knowledge to other specialists thus producing, so to speak, a cultural synthesis between the cosmovisions of the East and the West. Nowadays, yoga practice has extended to people of different educational and economic levels. This work shows some of the results obtained from a research project on the matter in consideration, which seeks to contribute relevant data for the labor field and a deeper understanding of the cultural elements of different contexts and their effect on the people’s quality of life at a local level.

The Importance of Friendship in the Construction of Positive Nations

This chapter is written by two Argentineans, Graciela Tonon and Lia Rodriguez de la Vega, and brings interesting data from their own studies regarding friendship as relational glue for a positive nation. Departing from the results gathered, where friendship emerged as the variable ranked with the highest value for the people interviewed, they define the concept and its typologies and connect it with the idea of a positive nation, with Martin Seligman’s flourishing model, and, finally, with Aristotle’s idea of friendship as community. Alongside the chapter, we can understand, through the testimonies and words of the interviewed, the dynamic perspectives regarding friendship as an instrument for self-construction, where mechanisms of proximity and similarity intervene and evoke a founding for participation and collective construction.