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.
Sarah White
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
“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
()