Well Being As A Multidimensional Concept

Well-Being as a Multidimensional Concept contributes to our understanding of the ways that culture and community influence concepts of wellness, the experience of well-being, and health outcomes. This book includes both theoretical conceptualizations and practice-based explorations.

The troubled state of Aboriginal health in Australia is a seemingly perennial problem, despite ongoing research, policies and interventions. The second edition of this book examines the processes and practices behind this situation, and provides practical strategies to assist in addressing this complex subject.

“An indispensable reference for all researchers interested in the measurement of social welfare. . .” —François Bourguignon, Emeritus Professor at Paris School of Economics, Former Chief Economist of the World Bank. “. . .a detailed, insightful, and pedagogical presentation of the theoretical grounds of multidimensional well-being, inequality, and poverty measurement. Any student, researcher, and practitioner interested in the multidimensional approach should begin their journey into such a fascinating theme with this wonderful book.” —François Maniquet, Professor, Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. A Review of the Multidimensional Approaches to the Measurement of Welfare, Inequality, and Poverty Analyzing Multidimensional Well-Being: A Quantitative Approach offers a comprehensive approach to the measurement of well-being that includes characteristics such as income, health, literacy, and housing. The author presents a systematic comparison of the alternative approaches to the measurement of multidimensional welfare, inequality, poverty, and vulnerability. The text contains real-life applications of some multidimensional aggregations (most of which have been designed by international organizations such as the United Nations Development Program and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) that help to judge the performance of a country in the various dimensions of well-being. The text offers an evaluation of how well a society is doing with respect to achievements of all the individuals in the dimensions considered and clearly investigates how achievements in the dimensions can be evaluated from different perspectives. The author includes a detailed scrutiny of alternative techniques for setting weights to individual dimensional metrics and offers an extensive analysis into both the descriptive and welfare theoretical approaches to the concerned multi-attribute measurement and related issues. This important resource: • Contains a synthesis of multidimensional welfare, inequality, poverty, and vulnerability analysis • Examines aggregations of achievement levels in the concerned dimensions of well-being from various standpoints • Shows how to measure poverty using panel data instead of restricting attention to a single period and when we have imprecise information on dimensional achievements • Argues that multidimensional analysis is intrinsically different from marginal distributions-based analysis Written for students, teachers, researchers, and scholars, Analyzing Multidimensional Well-Being: A Quantitative Approach puts the focus on various approaches to the measurementof the many aspects of well-being and quality of life. Satya R. Chakravarty is a Professor of Economics at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India. He is an Editor of Social Choice and Welfare and a member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Economic Inequality.

This book discusses child well-being, with children and adolescents as key informants, from a Latin American perspective. It explores theoretical and empirical issues related to well-being and associated aspects, in order to understand the well-being of this population. Topics analyzed in this volume address for instance environment and community, rights, leisure time, technologies, interpersonal relationships and spirituality and their implications for changes in the well-being in children and adolescents. Especially relevant for scholars and professionals in the social and health sciences, as well as policy makers, seeking to promote child well-being, regardless of the area in which they operate.

Cultures of Sustainability and Wellbeing: Theories, Histories and Policies examines and assesses the interdependence between sustainability and wellbeing by drawing attention to humans as producers and consumers in a post-human age. Why wellbeing ought to be regarded as essential to sustainable development is explored first from multifocal theoretical perspectives encompassing sociology, literary criticism and socioeconomics, second in relation to institutions and policies, and third with a focus on specific case studies across the world. Wellbeing and its sustainability are defined in terms of biological and cultural diversity; stages of advancement in science and technology; notions of citizenship and agency; geopolitical scenarios and environmental conditions. Wellbeing and sustainability call for enquiries into human capacities in ontological, epistemological and practical terms. A view of sustainability that revolves around material and immaterial wellbeing is based on the assumption that life quality, comfort, happiness, security, safety always posit humans as both recipients and agents. Risk and resilience in contemporary societies define the intrinsically human ability to make and consume, to act and adapt, driving the search for and fruition of wellbeing. How to sustain the dual process of exploitation and regeneration is a task that requires integrated approaches from the sciences and the humanities, jointly tracing a worldwide cartography with clear localisations. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers interested in sustainability through conceptual and empirical approaches including social theory, literary and cultural studies, environmental economics and human ecology, urbanism and cultural geography.

Subjective well-being refers to how people experience and evaluate their lives and specific domains and activities in their lives. This information has already proven valuable to researchers, who have produced insights about the emotional states and experiences of people belonging to different groups, engaged in different activities, at different points in the life course, and involved in different family and community structures. Research has also revealed relationships between people's self-reported, subjectively assessed states and their behavior and decisions. Research on subjective well-being has been ongoing for decades, providing new information about the human condition. During the past decade, interest in the topic among policy makers, national statistical offices, academic researchers, the media, and the public has increased markedly because of its potential for shedding light on the economic, social, and health conditions of populations and for informing policy decisions across these domains. Subjective Well-Being: Measuring Happiness, Suffering, and Other Dimensions of Experience explores the use of this measure in population surveys. This report reviews the current state of research and evaluates methods for the measurement. In this report, a range of potential experienced well-being data applications are cited, from cost-benefit studies of health care delivery to commuting and transportation planning, environmental valuation, and outdoor recreation resource monitoring, and even to assessment of end-of-life treatment options. Subjective Well-Being finds that, whether used to assess the consequence of people's situations and policies that might affect them or to explore determinants of outcomes, contextual and covariate data are needed alongside the subjective well-being measures. This report offers guidance about adopting subjective well-being measures in official government surveys to inform social and economic policies and considers whether research has advanced to a point which warrants the federal government collecting data that allow aspects of the population's subjective well-being to be tracked and associated with changing conditions.

Policy reforms to children's services are increasingly driven by outcomes that focus on child well-being. Until now, however, this concept has been dimly defined. Seeking a better understanding of what child well-being is and how services can improve it, Nick Axford's pivotal book provides groundbreaking pathways into understanding the true success of child services. After investigating the main approaches to thinking about child well-being, he goes on to apply them to the actual child population by examining household surveys and agency audit data. Finally, he considers the overall implications for children's services, providing a must-read for anyone interested in these critical programs.

This book provides insights into how human well-being could be better defined and empirically assessed. It takes stock of and reviews various concepts and measures and provides recommendations for future practice and research.