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The knowledge base in the domains of quality of life, well-being, and subjective well-being is continuing to grow at a rapid rate. In light of this growth, and the interest it reflects on the part of scholars, practitioners, and policy makers internationally, this book will play an important role in bringing scholars and students up to date on diverse topics and promoting and encouraging research in the field of quality-of-life (QOL) studies. Unlike most other similar publications quality of life studies is broadly construed to involve all of the social and health sciences. This volume has much to offer the reader. The papers reflect a diversity of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, it contains material on (a) the monitoring, assessing, and modelling of quality of life, (b) matters of policy, finance, marketing, and business, and (c) papers devoted to the determinants and correlates of well-being and quality of life.

Since initiating the journal Social Indicators Research in 1974, Alex C. Michalos has been a pioneer in social indicators and quality-of-life research. This collection of nineteen articles provides an overview of nearly 30 years of work, including papers drawn from diverse sources and papers never published before. Topics range over quality of life investigations connected to the problems of combining social, economic and environmental indicators, measuring the status of women in Canada, housing and migration, health and human well-being, older peoples'well-being, leisure activities and health, impact of public services, police services, criminal victimization, feminism and ethnic relations on the quality of life. The final paper, on multiple discrepancies theory (MDT), is the author's unique contribution to an empirically testable new foundation for theories of utility, satisfaction and happiness.

Global Instability: Uncertainty and New Visions in Political Economy presents a series of papers that address the political consequences of globalization for states and their populations, while exploring the issue of alternatives to the model of globalization we are presently experiencing. The focus moves from the world of international agreements to the national and sub-national dilemmas that are posed by attempting to manage a set of global developments within a given territory. The initial chapter, by Daniel Drache, explores a still-born post-war international organization, the International Trade Organization, that offers a different vision of how a globally integrated economy might operate. A number of papers then explore the challenges posed by today's globalization, including currency instability in an environment of financial deregulation, the rights conferred on investors by the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the progressive liberalization of trade in services built into the General Agreement on Trade in Services.

The International Society for Quality of Life Studies held its first conference in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1997. Participants at the conference were allowed to submit their papers for the present volume. The submitted manuscripts went through a review and revision process, and the papers in this book represent the best articles from that process. Because the society sponsoring this volume is international in character, it is not sur­ prising that the 11 contributions are from 4 different countries: Canada (3), India (1), Netherlands (3), and the United States (4). Thus, the volume is cross-national in authorship, although we hope that future works can include more papers from additional nations. Ten of the eleven papers consider quality of life in terms of some aspect of subjective well-being. The book is broken into three sections: the first section presenting material on broad theories of subjective well­ being, the second section covering how work and income are related to subjective well-being, and the third section containing one chapter on health and one on political representation. I am proud to present these broad-ranging chapters on quality of life.

This volume provides an overview of the ways the Italian school of quality of life studies addresses well-being and quality of life, from both a substantive and a methodological point of view. It discusses various topics such as those of equitable and sustainable wellbeing, lifestyles, the organization of economy and welfare, as well as aspects related to the measurement of quality of life in small towns, institutional transparency and corruption prevention indicators. Chapters presented in this volume are drawn from papers presented at the conferences of the Italian Association for Quality of Life Studies (AIQUAV) held in Florence, Italy, in 2015 and 2016. The volume is organised into three parts. The first part is devoted to methods and indicators for research on quality of life, the second part to social sustainability, lifestyles, cultural aspects and local applications, and the third to economy, welfare and quality of life. The volume hosts contributions that are interdisciplinary in scope and mirror the complexity of the globalized world.

The majority of studies on the quality of life have been conducted in Western contexts and are based on Western participants. Comparatively speaking, there are only a few studies that have been conducted in different Chinese contexts. Also, there are fewer QOL studies based on children and adolescents, or studies that examine the relationship between QOL and economic disadvantage. In addition, more research is needed to address the methodological issues related to the assessment of quality of life. This volume is a constructive response to the challenges described above. It is the first book to cover research in Chinese, Western and global contexts in a single volume. It is a ground-breaking volume in which Chinese studies on the quality of life are collected. The book includes papers addressing family QOL, quality of life in adolescents experiencing economic disadvantage, and methodological issues in the assessment of QOL. It is written by researchers working in a variety of disciplines.

This book is to elucidate personal and social bases for personal resilience, thus addressing the issue concerning the predominance of social factors in shaping resilience. Essentially, the book starts with a clarification of resilience as a phenomenon rather than a trait. The clarification also identifies the personal bases in terms of the resilience process, which specifies belief about resilience as a precursor to learning about resilience, action for resilience, and resilience successively. To justify the personal and social bases, the book expounds the analytical-functionalist framework to specify voluntaristic and deterministic mechanisms to perform the four requisite functions of goal attainment, adaptation, integration, and latency. Equipped with the conceptual and theoretical grounds, the book proceeds to scrutinize the effects of personal and social factors on resilience and its process. The personal factors include personal background characteristics, personality, functional disability, and various beliefs, whereas the social factors include experiences of caring, peace, violence, and social exclusion in society, kindness, sociability, and aid from other people, and social capital. The scrutiny engages five databases about 6.948 Chinese people in Hong Kong and neighboring Chinese cities, composed of the public, service users, older adults, students, and people with visual impairment. Overall, the book presents ample theoretical and empirical substances to clarify the genesis of resilience.

This volume examines progress in sustainable and resilient development of niche forms of tourism from a health and wellbeing perspective. It also aims to offer deep and innovative insights on the supporting role of non-pharmaceutical interventions to enhance resilience and wellbeing of visited and visiting communities. A comparative and critical discourse of the role of hard medicine is also offered, from both a core and supplementary perspective, particularly, from eudaimonic and physiologically restorative standpoints. Furthermore, indigenous non-pharmaceutical interventions and spiritual healing mechanisms are discussed in the context of their potential to facilitate long term immunity and happiness. The book conceptually situates health as a fourth pillar of sustainability, and examines its role in stimulating long-lasting transformations rooted in positive psychology, inner transformation and sustainable consumption of organic productsand services. It designs an evolving transformational ‘Quality of Life'paradigm that strengthens the foundations of health/wellbeing-based sustainable development initiatives and resilience of tourism systems. The work will be of interest to academic, professional, and various public and private stakeholders of tourism such as destination marketing organizations, policy makers, hospitality industries, tour operators, host communities, NGOs, and government agencies.

This handbook provides an extensive overview of the links between quality of life and social change as pursued in not only humanitarian and development work, but also in the private sector and academia. It combines theoretical and practice-focused chapters and addresses socio-economic, environmental, and political/governance aspects as well as communication and human behavioural factors that favour or hamper social change dynamics. The handbook showcases vast diversity both in the authorship—which includes practitioners from a wide range of sectors and academics from various disciplines—as well in geographical contexts and regions. The chapters cover a wide range methods and tools, which facilitate an inclusive understanding of the relationship between quality of life and social change. They show connections between micro (individual) changes and the dynamics that derive from them at the meso (community), macro (country) and meta levels (planet) of quality of life, and the social change processes sustained through time. The chapters demonstrate that quality of life and social change mutually condition and nurture each other. The handbook overall provides a holistic perspective to social change processes that includes both material and non-material aspects relating to quality of life. This comprehensive and one-of-a-kind volume is of interest to a wide readership, from students and researchers of social development, quality of life and wellbeing research, to development workers, policy makers and other government officials. The handbook is bundled with an interactive online course.

This book presents advanced methodologies for analyzing attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccine across 10 countries spanning both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, employing cutting-edge Big Data and Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) techniques. Serving as an important resource for policymakers, it addresses attitudes towards and causes of growing vaccine hesitancy —a pressing concern identified by the World Health Organization as a top 10 global health threat. Moreover, the book sheds light on key factors associated with positive vaccine attitudes, aiming to bolster vaccine uptake rates. The authors explore the role of happiness in shaping health-related decision-making, offering actionable policy recommendations for governments. By sharing best-case practices, they equip policymakers and health officials worldwide with the necessary strategies to address future pandemics effectively.

This book explores child vulnerability in various contexts from a cross-country, comparative perspective. It shows how vulnerability in childhood develops within subjects in relationships with other people (other children, parents, specialists, such as teachers, social workers, and judges), how it is created by welfare, health care, education, and justice systems, and is empowered by multiple crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, wars and natural disasters. The authors hope to enhance dialogue between childhood studies and children's rights studies through these discussions. The role of children's agency and autonomy, including their right to participate in decision-making processes related to their own life, has a special emphasis in this book. Importantly, the book discusses ethical considerations and challenges connected to the participation of vulnerable children in research. It also adds insights into domain-based child vulnerability, particularly through participatory action research with extremely vulnerable children with traumatic pasts in Estonian substitute care and Ukrainian children with refugee status in Estonia. The book thereby provides deep insights into the ways to increase child well-being by decreasing vulnerabilities and building resilience. It combines approaches from psychology, sociology, law, educational sciences, social work, and media studies, and is an important resource for academics as well as practitioners and policy-makers working on children's well-being.

This book provides a systematic review of the research literature related to the effectiveness of organizational policies and programs on work-life balance (WLB). It discusses policies and practices related to workload management, flextime, flexplace, alternative job arrangements, and family care. Based on the evidence, the authors make specific recommendations to organizational executives and HR directors to design and implement work-life balance policies and programs to maximize their effectiveness and help employees achieve their optimal level of work-life balance. Specifically, the authors discuss how to: (1) identify employees with greater need for WLB programs, (2) evaluate environmental circumstances for WLB programs (3) design effective WLB policies and programs, (3) facilitate effective implementation of WLB policies and programs, (4) provide management support for WLB policies and programs, and (5) evaluate performance of WLB policies and programs. Written lucidly by experts in the field and with many case studies and examples, this book appeals to a wide range of academic and professional readers.

This volume provides innovative perspectives on the scholarly connection between the humanities and happiness, and considers the narrative expressions of happiness and recent investigations about happiness, its metrics, and objective insights about human wellbeing. This volume relates intemporal humanistic values to views across social and behavioural sciences, and thereby covers a broad interdisciplinary frame, from philosophy, psychology, literary studies, to the communication sciences. The philosophers in this volume discuss the achievement of happiness through the cultivation of virtue, as well as the logic of the gift as an experience of personal fulfilment and the fact that happiness is inextricably linked to hope. Their chapters take on the approach of the permanent human struggle to generate global horizons of happiness and thus attain eternal bliss. Scholars from other fields of the humanities and communication sciences consider the positive messages of environmental happiness in virtual platforms, where the Homo digitalis finds happiness at the click of a button, often under the endorsement of celebrities, or under the visual fruition of playful objects. They also present the intertextual memory of happiness as a condition for humanistic research. Finally, this volume considers the sphere of education as the best place in which to apply the results of sustainable happiness measurement and research, and to realize this complementary, humanistic perspective on happiness research.

Everybody wants to know what makes people happy. Artistic takes on the topic in literature, popular songs and cinema are widespread, but not terribly helpful. Psychological accounts are mostly about how to avoid unhappiness. So who actually is happy, and why? This book offers real answers from the real world of American society. Their source is the General Social Survey, a scientific poll of Americans offering some five decades of state-of-the-art data. An additional enhancement is a set of qualitative interviews commissioned by the author adding depth to the extraordinary breadth of the GSS. The approach of the book is distinctly sociological. Are married Americans happier than unmarried Americans? Does social class matter? How about college? The answers lie within this wide and deep dive into happiness in America.

Quality of Life and Climate Change: Impacts, Sustainable Adaptation, and Social-Ecological Resilience delves into the pressing concerns surrounding climate change and its profound impacts on the quality of life (QoL) experienced by individuals and communities worldwide. This book explores the intricate relationship between climate change, variability, and QoL in both rural and urban settings. It undertakes a detailed review of QoL assessments to examine the extent to which climatic changes and livability conditions are incorporated into existing evaluations. By shedding light on the critical need to consider climatic factors in measuring and comparing QoL, especially in the context of creating aging-friendly and climate-neutral cities, this publication addresses a significant research gap. To answer the question of how climate change and its variability impact the QoL of living beings across diverse geographical settings, this book expands our understanding of this crucial topic through reporting and documentation of the associations between climatic changes and QoL, particularly in understudied rural and urban areas. Furthermore, the book emphasizes resilience as a critical factor in maintaining urban QoL and developing sustainable living environments. A key contribution of this work lies in the exploration of various models adopted worldwide to enhance resilience and create sustainable living environments in the face of climate change. By examining these models, the book strives to identify effective solutions for maintaining and enhancing QoL, as well as building resilient systems capable of withstanding climate change and variability. This book presents prospective themes, including sustainable solutions, mitigation strategies, and models to enhance socio-ecological resilience. The chapters within the book cover a wide range of topics including climatic variations and future projections, technological advancements in climate change mitigation, implications for residential and non-residential areas, industrial solutions, SDG attainment, mitigation strategies, QoL measurement instruments, and urban QoL models. By addressing these themes, the book provides a comprehensive analysis of the complex interactions between climate change, QoL, and the pursuit of sustainable development. This book serves as a valuable resource for researchers, academicians, policymakers, civil society groups, think tanks, government and non-government organizations, international agencies, and other interested parties seeking to deepen their knowledge and capacity in the field of climate change and its impacts on QoL and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) attainment.

This open access book examines an interdependent approach to happiness and well-being, one that contrasts starkly with dominant approaches that have originated from Western culture(s). It highlights the diversity of potential pathways towards happiness and well-being globally, and answers calls - voiced in the UN's Sustainable Development Goals - for more socially and environmentally sustainable models.Leading global organizations including the OECD, UNICEF, and UNESCO are now proposing human happiness and well-being as a more sustainable alternative to a myopic focus on GDP growth. Yet, the definition of well-being offered by these organizations derives largely from the philosophies, social sciences, and institutional patterns of Europe and the United States. Across seven chapters this book carefully probes the inadequacy of these approaches to well-being globally and reveals the distorting effect this has on how we imagine our world, organize institutions, and plan ourcollective future(s). It shares a wealth of evidence and examples from across East Asia - a region where interdependence remains foregrounded - and concludes by provocatively arguing that interdependence may provide a more sustainable approach to happiness and well-being in the 21st century. A timely and accessible book, it offers fresh insights for scholars and policymakers working in the areas of psychology, health, sociology, education, international development, public policy, and philosophy.This is an open access book.

This open access book constitutes a transnational and multidisciplinary inquiry of the most pressing challenges faced by young people Not in Employment, nor in Education or Training (NEET) in rural areas across Europe.. Rural NEETs are one of the most invisible segments of the youth population, in spite of the fact that the percentage of NEETs is higher in the countryside, compared to those in suburban and urban areas across the EU and many of the Southern and Eastern European countries. This book identifies and analyses different factors that may contribute to or hamper youth social development and social inclusion. Among them are main individual features of rural NEETs, the quality and characteristics of rural NEETs'informal social networks and support, the singularities of formal and non-formal education in rural areas and how they shape the transition from school to work, the role of employment services in providing adequate institutional support, the importance of policy package designor the role of new paradigms of rural development to uphold vulnerable young people in the European countryside. The contributions offered in this book provide a new model of analysis and comprehension of rural NEETs'personal development and social inclusion. This book therefore establishes the state of the art regarding available knowledge on rural NEETs, and represents an inspirational resource for new research agendas on the subject of vulnerable rural youth in Europe. This book also forms the policy design in areas such as education, employment, and social welfare in rural areas.

To be comfortable stands as an aspiration of the times; to be comfortable defines what it means to live ‘the good life'. We talk about such things as maintaining a comfortable home, a comfortable lifestyle and a comfortable retirement. We seek out comforts in the relationships we sustain, the leisure practices we enact and the possessions we accumulate. We look for promises of comfort in the words of a close friend and our next pair of shoes. Furnished in the home, optionally outfitted in cars, scrutinised in holiday brochures and brushed up against in the clothes we wear, comfort is there, marking distinctions and framing decisions about what it means to live well. But by consuming comfort in the ways that we do, we do ourselves harm and limit our only planet of its capacity to provide for the requirements of life. This is a world that grows ever more uncomfortable because of comfort and when linked to consumption and excess, indulgence and apathy, it occurs that comfort carries effects that have existential consequence.Utilising analyses of popular culture and ethnographic accounts of everyday life, Comfort and Contemporary Culture works through case study accounts of comfort's enactment to pose questions around what it means to live, now. Comfort and Contemporary Culture poses alternative renderings of the idea of comfort to return the concept to its earliest roots in notions of confortāre. The revisioning of what we take as comfort requires urgent attention, with the ecological, social and intrapersonal implications of comfort's current excesses demonstrative of this need. This book will be relevant reading for students and scholars of cultural studies and sociology, cultural anthropology, social geography and studies of community.

This book makes a systematic empirical analysis of the quality of life of Chinese residents from the perspective of social change, expounds the connotation, theory, elements, and research methodology of the quality of life, and focuses on the diachronic dynamic analysis of the multidimensional elements of the quality of life from the perspective of life course and life cycle. According to the research content, the book is divided into three topics. The first topic, from the first chapter to the third chapter, mainly focuses on the quality of life research and theoretical evolution, providing theoretical guidance for the empirical analysis of the book and scientific significance for the study of the quality of life in social change. The second project, from Chapter 4 to Chapter 7, focuses on the influence factors of quality of life of a Chinese resident, structure composition, and the relationship between the related factors to conduct empirical research, the purpose is to more clearlyunderstand the present status of life quality in the Chinese culture, for the further scientific research was related to quality of life to provide the basic framework. The third topic, from Chapter 8 to Chapter 13, focuses on empirical analysis of the changes and development of subjective and objective quality of life of Chinese residents.

This book studies children's wellbeing from the perspective of Ethiopian immigrant families in Israel. It examines how the meeting of cultures within families affects relationships, language acquisition and the transmission of cultural heritage across generations after immigration. The younger generation, born in Israel or having arrived as infants, are faced with a reality very different from their parent's childhood in Ethiopia. The book therefore addresses these key questions: What are the differences between families that enable some children to adopt a hybrid identity while others feel detached? How are the children affected by their experiences in Israeli society and specifically the educational system? What factors in their childhoods foster resilience and how do these children relate to their Ethiopian heritage? The book presents unique insights into the realities experienced by immigrant families using their own narratives, as it is based oninterviews by the author with 50 members of immigrant families from different generations. It is of special interest to academic courses on wellbeing, family studies, immigrants, diaspora studies, ethnic and religious studies, anthropology, folklore, sociology, gender studies, social work, child psychology and more.

The second volume of this handbook develops on and extends the discussion in the successful first volume, published in 2012. This is a timely addition to the literature, drawing on the momentum that quality of life (QOL) research in tourism has gained in the 21st century and on the boom in the tourism industry itself. It focuses on four areas of growth in QOL research in the recent past: (1) travelers/tourists, (2) host communities, (3) service providers, and (4) the role of technology. The handbook helps management of tourism firms and policy makers develop specific policies and programs to ensure the most positive impact of tourism on tourists, host communities, and service providers. The comprehensive coverage of topics in this handbook makes it a state-of-the-art reference. Academics interested in QOL research in travel and tourism, tourism practitioners interested in applying the science of QOL in the tourism industry, as well as policy makers involved in regulating the industry will view the handbook as indispensable source of recent research.

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes spelt out a vision of the impending utopia. Work, he said, will become a thing of the past. ‘For the first time since creation,'he predicted, ‘man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem — how to occupy the leisure which science…will have won for him.'So where did this vision of future past go? Like baco-foil suits and meals of protein pills, it proved to be a concept that withered on the vine. Instead of an excess of free time to be enjoyed at leisure, a radically different regime now dominates the developed nations: the leisure principle. The leisure principle is one of work hard to play hard, a rigorous pursuit of monetarised hedonism: YOLO, live your best life, have a good time all the time. From the ecstasy of the digital to the monied spectacle that is sport, the gamification of everyday life to the flourishing hierarchy of influencers, Griffith Review 81: The Leisure Principle sets out to scrutinise the terms and conditions of this contemporary compact and consider how we came to cede so much just to amuse ourselves to death.

The idea of «wellbeing» is increasingly prevalent in global policy contexts. Yet, as the chapters in this collection demonstrate, any understanding of wellbeing is contextual: what wellbeing is depends on where and how we listen and speak, the concepts at our disposal, the humans and nonhumans with whom we engage, and the focus of their, and our, aspirations. Many of the chapters in this collection reflect the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, which, in 2019, introduced a wellbeing approach to public policy that attracted the attention of global policy makers and other stakeholders. In this collection, commentators both from within and beyond Aotearoa take an expansive stance in discussing the concept of wellbeing and its myriad possibilities. The authors speak from an array of disciplines to present and critique ideas about how wellbeing can be understood and pursued across the life course.

This book aims to provide a complete overview of the current status of lifestyle and transport changes in China, focusing on the ongoing trends in lifestyle and transport technologies, which are shaping a new lifestyle and transport system. An additional focus is to discuss the mechanism behind the influence of transport on lifestyles, and analyze the influence of transport facilities on lifestyles, which will help to give efficient and effective transport solutions. Using macro statistics and survey data from Beijing and Chinese villages and towns, this book explores the interactive development of lifestyle and transportation in China over the past 40 years. The analyses and findings in this book would enhance our existing knowledge of the relationship lifestyle and transport. The policies discussed in the book would provide fresh evidences for policy-making on updating transport services in order to cope with the changes of people's lifestyle. This book will be of great interest to scholars and governmental agencies interested in transport development, transport policy, social transition, sustainable transport, urban planning, urban governance, and is relevant to China and other developing countries.

This training book is designed to help professionals enhance their knowledge of community quality-of-life indicators, and to develop viable community projects. Chapter 1 describes the theoretical concepts that guide the formulation of community indicator projects. Chapter 2 creates a sample community indicator project as a template of the entire process. Chapter 3 describes the planning process: how to identify sponsors, secure funding, develop an organizational structure, select a quality-of-life model, select indicators, and so on. Chapter 4 focuses on data collection. Finally, Chapter 5 describes efforts related to dissemination and promotion of community indicators projects. Written by a stalwart in the field of quality-of-life research, this book provides the tools of sound community project planning for quality-of-life researchers, social workers, social marketers, community research organizations, and policy-makers.

This volume continues the tradition now established since 2006, of compiling excellent research into the practice and application of community indicators in a single source volume. It focuses on the theme of the Community Indicators Consortium 2020 Summit, as a significant venue for the advancement of the practice and theory of community indicators work. It covers the conference's theme of “community resilience”, which is the capacity of all of a community's elements to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience. In keeping with the practical, “best cases” emphasis of this book series, the editors incorporate a case-based approach to chapters discussing how specific indicators, indices or series of indicators can lead to better decisions and outcomes to help communities adapt and transform in the face of challenges, helping them prepare for both the expected and the unexpected to sustain and improve quality of life, including technology and open source approaches to data sharing and data-focussed collaboration; evolving approaches that use shared indicators to improve overall community well-being and quality of life; research related to community indicators and policy, application, research, and/or practice; and techniques and approaches to measure resilience. This volume is of interest to social scientists, management professionals, social workers and policy makers working on various aspects of community indicators of quality of life and well-being. Chapter “The Cost of Sea Level Rise for the Island Community of Vinalhaven, Maine: Spurring action through collaborative data analysis” is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see licence information in the chapters.

​This book addresses and compensates for the lack of poverty measurement research in China. With regard to the multi-dimensional measurement of poverty, it is clear that the situation of Chinese farmers is problematic in terms of five major aspects: sanitation facilities, health insurance, durable consumer goods, productive assets and modern fuels. Based on these criteria, the book provides a clear direction for policy intervention to comprehensively improve farmers'standard of living and tackle the key problems of poverty alleviation and development in the region. In addition, its analysis of poverty among ethnic minorities, the elderly and children offers valuable reference material for poverty alleviation and the development of special groups.

Agriculture is the backbone of our economic system. It provides not only food and raw material but also employment opportunities to a very large number of people. Higher atmospheric temperature has an impact on crop yields while the changes in rainfall could affect both crop quality and quantity. Climate change, therefore, could increase the prices of major crops in some regions. For the most vulnerable people, lower agricultural output means lower income. In addition, climate change is expected to increase the risk of illness and death from extreme heat and poor air quality. Recent evidence is the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, climate change also affects the occurrence of other infectious diseases. A number of well-known diseases are climate-sensitive - malaria, dengue fever, and cholera among others. Tourism is considered as an industry and alternative contributor to a nation's income. It can generate employment opportunities and boost up the economy. This book, consisting of 26 chapters, focuses on the issues of agriculture, tourism and health for livelihood enhancement. It is essential to discuss these diverse issues in the field of geography as it encompasses interdisciplinary topics. The range of concerns at the national, regional and local levels is not confined to geography only but also involves other disciplines as well. Therefore, this book is a valuable source for scientists and researchers in allied fields such as livelihood, agriculture, land use, tourism management, health care and tribal studies. Furthermore, this book can be of immense help to the researchers, planners and decision makers engaged in solving problems in these areas in developing countries and beyond.

This open access book defines happiness intuitively and explores several common conceptual mistakes with regard to happiness. It then moves on to address topical issues including, but not limited to, whether money can buy you happiness, why happiness is ultimately the only thing of intrinsic value, and the various factors important for happiness. It also presents a more reliable and interpersonally comparable method for measuring happiness and discusses twelve factors, from A to L, that are crucial for individual happiness: attitude, balance, confidence, dignity, engagement, family/friends, gratitude, health, ideals, joyfulness, kindness and love. Further, it examines important public policy considerations, taking into account recent advances in economics, the environmental sciences, and happiness studies. Novel issues discussed include: an environmentally responsible happy nation index to supplement GDP, the East Asian happiness gap, a case for stimulating pleasure centres of the brain, and an argument for higher public spending.

This book proposes new solutions to the problem of poverty, and begins with providing analyses. It bases most of the analyses and solutions in the context of the digital era. The book also follows, in addition to a scientific distribution, a spatial-geographical one: analyses of countries of the European Union as well as South Africa, while it referring to two main variables, television and art, as agents of poverty alleviation. The book places particular focus on how poverty is understood in the framework of Industry 4.0. It introduces a new expanded Multidimensional Poverty Index with more than 20 dimensions; moreover, it provides a mathematically based solution for the disposal of perishable food. Finally, it does not disregard the crucial aspect of the issue of poverty: that of education planning. This book is of interest to specialists in poverty research, from students to professionals and from professors to activists, without excluding engineers.

This book addresses the life quality of the average adult in the world, based on international data weighted according to national population size. It rests on the theoretical framework of analytic-functionalism to explain statics and dynamics in the production of life quality. The statics means the influences of personal and national factors on life quality, whereas the dynamics mean the changes in the influences over time. This approach elucidates life quality at the personal level rather than at the national level, which overlooks what happens to the average person living in the world. The approach involves a broad view of the production of life quality, including experiences, practices, and appraisals of life. This production also involves personal background characteristics and the national indicators of modernization, globalization, and environmental issues. Knowledge about the production is helpful for policymakers, researchers, students, and other people to upgrade life quality. Such knowledge is valuable because it is up-to-date, generalizable, and sensible based on the analytic-functionalist theoretical framework and statistical estimation.

The book explores, through a reflection on food, the complexity of the concept of well-being. It starts from the consideration that food is a fundamental element for human well-being, and for well-being of the planet as a whole. Not only does food guarantee the survival of human beings, it is also a cultural expression. With regard to the Italian socio-cultural context, the contributors explore how food relates to aspects such as history, tradition, new food styles, health, and the old and new technologies used to produce food. The studies in the book do not simply analyse indicators to illustrate the Italian situation in the'here and now'. As part of the tradition of studies on social indicators, they provide valid and well-founded indications to contribute to an improvement in the quality of life for years to come.This work on the theme of food represents a very useful contribution to the general reflection on well-being and its statistical, sociological, and multidisciplinary study, due to the importance historically given to food in Italy and the socio-cultural implications of food in various life contexts.

This book focuses on projects using child indicators outside of a research context and provides a user-friendly set of materials to help professionals or organizations start and sustain high-quality child indicator projects. The book is based on the fundamental idea that better data leads to better decisions regarding programs for children. The number of people with experience and expertise in developing child indicator projects is limited in many countries. This initiative provides critical information on the topic in a cost-effective manner, and thereby fills an important niche regarding the use of child indicators. To the extent that it promotes more and better child indicator projects, the book leads to more attention for children and better decision-making regarding public support for children. It is also likely to increase the number of such projects that exist and to improve the quality of such projects. This easy-to-use and practical guide is for all professionals and organizations working with child indicators data.

This handbook makes a major contribution to the growing international research and policy interest in children's experienced well-being or quality of life in childhood, linking it to ongoing research on children's risk and vulnerability. The editors and contributors adopt the broader concept of ‘risk'in addition to ‘vulnerability'. Not much work considers the connections between risks that children experience and their quality of life. In examining children's quality of life, the chapters discuss various issues of risk and vulnerability that may affect their lives and also how the quality of childhood might be enhanced and maintained even in the face of these factors. The chapters discuss experiences of violence and abuse; access to basic services such as housing, health and education; and children's vulnerability due to broader external factors such as war, conflict, and environmental events. The volume also includes the impacts of new technologies on children and the consequent risks and vulnerabilities they may face, alongside the benefits.This important volume brings together a diverse range of perspectives from established experts and emerging scholars in these fields of work. It covers a wide range of geographical and cultural contexts, and includes theoretical, empirical, policy and practice-based contributions. This handbook is a natural first point of reference for academics and policy professionals interested in quality of life, well-being, and children's rights.

This book brings together essays analyzing the impact of sport and physical activity on psychophysical well-being and quality of life, through multidisciplinary and multi-country studies. It discusses how the commercial dimension of sport entertainment and recreational dimension of sport practice have been increasingly brought together in discussions on individual health and well-being, and social integration and participation. It therefore considers the relationship between sports practice, enjoyment of sporting events, sport participation and quality of life. The chapters examine various aspects of the practice of sport for professional and recreational purposes from the perspective of age, life course research, physical education in schools, government investment in sport activities across various stages of life, the rise of sports tourism as a global industry and how social networks and web apps are changing the perception of fitness. This innovative book is of interest to scholars and students of sport science, leisure studies, and well-being research.

Modern life is full of stuff yet bereft of time. An economic sociologist offers an ingenious explanation for why, over the past seventy-five years, Americans have come to prefer consumption to leisure.Productivity has increased steadily since the mid-twentieth century, yet Americans today work roughly as much as they did then: forty hours per week. We have witnessed, during this same period, relentless growth in consumption. This pattern represents a striking departure from the preceding century, when working hours fell precipitously. It also contradicts standard economic theory, which tells us that increasing consumption yields diminishing marginal utility, and empirical research, which shows that work is a significant source of discontent. So why do we continue to trade our time for more stuff?Time for Things offers a novel explanation for this puzzle. Stephen Rosenberg argues that, during the twentieth century, workers began to construe consumer goods as stores of potential free time to rationalize the exchange of their labor for a wage. For example, when a worker exchanges their labor for an automobile, they acquire a duration of free activity that can be held in reserve, counterbalancing the unfree activity represented by work. This understanding of commodities as repositories of hypothetical utility was made possible, Rosenberg suggests, by the standardization of durable consumer goods, as well as warranties, brands, and product-testing, which assured wage earners that the goods they purchased would be of consistent, measurable quality.This theory clarifies perplexing aspects of behavior under industrial capitalism—the urgency to spend earnings on things, the preference to own rather than rent consumer goods—as well as a variety of historical developments, including the coincident rise of mass consumption and the legitimation of wage labor.

Well-being studies is an exciting and relatively new multi-disciplinary field, with data being gathered from different domains in order to improve social policies. In its reliance on a truncated account of well-being based implicitly on neoclassical economic assumptions, however, the field is deeply flawed. Departing from reductive accounts of well-being that exclude the normative or evaluative aspect of the concept and so impoverish the attendant conception of human life, this book offers a new perspective on what counts normatively as being well. In reconceptualising well-being holistically, it presents a fresh vista on how we can consider the meanings of human life in a manner that also serves as a source of constructive social critique. The book thus undertakes to invert the usual approach to the social sciences, in which the research is required to be objective in terms of methodology and subjective with regard to evaluative claims. Instead, the authors are deliberately objective about values in order to be more open to the subjectivities of human life. Happiness, Flourishing and the Good Life thus seeks to move away from economic considerations'domination of all social spaces in order to understand the possibilities of well-being beyond instrumentalisation or commodification. A radical new approach to the human well-being, this book will appeal to philosophers, social theorists and political scientists and all who are interested in human happiness.

Mainstream gerontological scholarship has taken little heed of people ageing with disability, and they have also been largely overlooked by both disability and ageing policies and service systems. The Handbook on Ageing with Disability is the first to pull together knowledge about the experience of ageing with disability. It provides a broad look at scholarship in this developing field and across different groups of people with disability in order to form a better understanding of commonalities across groups and identify unique facets of ageing within specific groups. Drawing from academic, personal, and clinical perspectives, the chapters address topics stemming from how the ageing with disability experience is framed, the heterogeneity of the population ageing with disability and the disability experience, issues of social exclusion, health and wellness, frailty, later life, and policy contexts for ageing with disability in various countries. Responding to the need to increase access to knowledge in this field, the Handbook provides guideposts for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers about what matters in providing services, developing programmes, and implementing policies that support persons ageing with long-term disabilities and their families.

This volume draws together the work of a diverse range of thinkers and researchers to address the question of happiness critically, using a wide variety of theoretical and empirical methodologies. Broadening the discussion beyond what might be considered highly individual and insular conceptualizations of happiness, often based on purely positivist approaches to the subject, authors raise questions about the nature of individual and collective anxieties that might underpin the current emphasis on happiness and the ideological or governmental ends that may be served by the framing of happiness in psychology and economics. With attention to how individuals understand and pursue happiness in their daily lives, Critical Happiness Studies highlights different theoretical paradigms that demonstrate the role of power in producing specific conceptualizations of happiness and, consequently, how they frame individual self-understanding or subjectivities and (re)shape political problems. The collection makes available critical, theoretical, and methodological resources for addressing a powerful set of cultural, political, and scientific discourses that have loomed large since the closing decade of the 20th century. A call for the establishment of a body of work in critical happiness studies, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities interested in the age-old problem of happiness.

'This book makes a vital contribution to the current literature on human well-being. Through a condensed but incisive analysis of a wide range of sources, from ancient philosophy to the political constitutions of modern nation states, Annie Austin builds a strong case for a universal core of human well-being. Her identification of the vital importance of an'infrastructure of sociality'should be noted by academicians, politicians and policy-makers who are seeking to use well-being as a means of rethinking how we are to meet the challenges of the 21st century.'—Allister McGregor, University of Sheffield, UKThis book examines the differing policy implications of the different conceptions of wellbeing across the world. There is an ongoing debate, in both philosophical and policy circles, about the legitimacy of universal frameworks of wellbeing. Who should decide what it means to live a good life? Is it possible to arrive at a shared definition, or is there simply too much individual and cultural diversity in conceptions of the good life? By devising an ‘overlapping consensus'on wellbeing, the book represents a starting point for political negotiation and public deliberation about the kinds of societies we (as collectivities) wish to create, and the kinds of lives we (as individuals embedded in those societies) want to live. The book provides philosophically-informed public policy insight, making it a valuable contribution to interdisciplinary wellbeing scholarship.

This is the first volume addressing the importance of teaching quality of life theory and methodology in different domains: social sciences, philosophy, sociology, political science, marketing, education, urbanism, statistics, economics, online learning, public health, sports, and constraint contexts in terms of their relationship with the Capability Approach. The chapters are written by important authors from Europe, North America, Asia, Latin America, Africa and Oceania, and present the syllabus and references of courses, making this volume important and necessary to university professors, students as well as teachers in general.

A unique perspective by a scholar, preacher, and social scientists. How can we live a meaningful life when problems are escalating? Many books claim they are changing the world. This book fulfills that promise.

Friendly social relations during free time, referred to here as leisure-based sociability, constitute a prominent reward of participation in groups based on voluntary membership, consisting for this review mainly of amateurs, hobbyists, volunteers, and their associations. This benefit is analyzed according to two subtypes: sociable nonprofit associations and social clubs. The goal of this issue of the Voluntaristics Review is to examine the leisure component of these two subtypes as framed in the serious leisure perspective (SLP), put nonprofit sociability in organizational context, and then review the empirical literature bearing on it. Excluded are the studies and theoretic treatises approaching nonprofit groups from another angle (e.g., organizational structure, management issues, funding sources, governmental regulation, type of employment). Specifically, this review centers on the relevant publications listed in the SLP website bearing on amateurs, hobbyists, and career volunteers (the serious pursuits), casual leisure, and project-based interests. It includes several extensions of the theory and research on leisure-related aspects of aging and retirement, arts and science administration, library and information science, positive psychology, therapeutic recreation and disability studies, and tourism and event analysis. Compared with the specialties in leisure studies, the SLP casts by far the broadest theoretical and empirical net in that interdisciplinary field. The research reviewed shows that such talk—generically known as socializing—reflects one or more of 14 themes. In general, members find sociability in these clubs and associations in and around the core activities they pursue there and on which the two subtypes have formed. The studies reviewed, taken together, provide considerable validation of the proposition that leisure-based sociability is a prominent reward of participating in a multitude of volunteer groups. Leisure-based sociability is essentially micro-analytic, but when viewed through the lens of the SLP, it can be further understood using meso and macro levels of analysis.

Embarking from a model of social capital hinging upon four social structures—work, family, social networks, and voluntary associations—Brian Jones empirically examines the widespread claims that American society is becoming less sociable, trusting, and cooperative. Breaking down datasets drawn from the General Social Survey (conducted 27 times from 1972 to 2008), Social Capital in American Life depicts the social values drawn from the four established social structures, as well as their interrelationships, their determinants, and ultimately their social capital, through a series of statistical and econometric methods. This rigorous, empirically driven analysis reveals how American society both confirms and repudiates fears about decreased cooperation given different cases and parameters.

Die Definition und Messung von Gesundheit ist der analytische Dreh- und Angelpunkt vieler empirischer Studien. Aus pragmatischen Gründen ist es jedoch oft nicht möglich, umfassende Gesundheitsdaten zu erheben, weshalb häufig eine subjektive Bewertung der Befragten („Self-Rated Health“) verwendet wird. Doch inwieweit wird dabei aufgrund unterschiedlicher Erwartungen, Maßstäbe oder Erfahrungen derselbe Gesundheitsstatus unterschiedlich bewertet? Diese und andere Fragen stehen im Fokus dieser Arbeit. Dabei stellt sich z. B. heraus, dass es große Altersunterschiede darin gibt, welche Gesundheitsaspekte in welchem Ausmaß in die Bewertung eingehen.

This volume presents a compilation of composite indicators created in order to measure important aspects of the quality of European societies. It examines three main questions: do Europeans live in good societies and enjoy good lives; are European societies becoming better as time passes, or is their quality slowly deteriorating; is the quality of life of Europe's citizens improving over time or is it gradually and irrecoverably getting worse. The volume uses a precise and rigorous system of information to answer these questions and to assess the current situation and monitor the quality of European societies. It describes and discusses fourteen key domains, and per chapter, presents five rankings of EU countries based on composite indicators, which are used as one of the best instruments social science has to synthesize a large amount of information, and they are especially well suited to measure multidimensional social phenomena. The new System of Indices on the Quality of European Societies (SIQES) presented in this volume offers a very broad and rich empirical overview of more than 70 social composite indicators and their nearly 300 dimensions. One of the key findings coming out from the SIQES is that, according to the societal quality of European countries, there exist five different “Europes” inside Europe.

In dem vorliegenden Band werden die Formen, Ursachen und Folgen von bezahlter und unbezahlter Arbeit im Ruhestand in den Blick genommen und diskutiert. Die Autorinnen und Autoren untersuchen in ihren Beiträgen bezahlte Erwerbstätigkeit und unbezahltes freiwilliges Engagement auf Basis verschiedener methodischer Zugänge. Sie stellen die (erwerbs-)biographischen Voraussetzungen dieser Tätigkeiten dar, deren subjektive Deutungen und ungleichheitsbezogene Implikationen etwa in Hinsicht auf Geschlecht, Alter und Gesundheit. Außerdem werden die vorhergehende Rentenplanung sowie organisationsbezogene und sozialpolitische Perspektiven auf die Verlängerung von Erwerbskarrieren thematisiert. Ziel des Bandes ist es, den Trend der zunehmenden Arbeit nach Renteneintritt sozialwissenschaftlich fundiert und kritisch zu reflektieren.Der Inhalt• Erwerbsarbeit und freiwilliges Engagement jenseits der Rentenaltersgrenze• Bezahlte und unbezahlte Arbeitals Formen der sozialen Teilhabe mit unterschiedlichen Zugangschancen• Chancen, Risiken und sozialpolitische Implikationen der Ausweitung produktiver Aktivitäten im AlterDie HerausgeberProf. Dr. Simone Scherger ist am SOCIUM - Forschungszentrum Ungleichheit und Sozialpolitik der Universität Bremen tätig.Dr. Claudia Vogel arbeitet am Deutschen Zentrum für Altersfragen in Berlin.

This book analyses the current state-of-the-art research on families, working hours and well-being in Europe, addressing both paid and non-paid work from a family perspective, and introducing emerging issues related to working hours and family life. Further, it discusses the implications of these issues for the well-being of individuals and families. Examining topics such as the division of paid and non-paid work within families, flexibility patterns, the 24/7 society, intensification of work, and the implication of mobile technology for work–family relations, it illustrates how the experiences of working families differ depending on their socio-economic status

Using longitudinal data from the Swiss Household Panel to zoom in on continuity and change in the life course, this open access book describes how the lives of the Swiss population have changed in terms of health, family circumstances, work, political participation, and migration over the last sixteen years. What are the different trajectories in terms of mobility, health, wealth, and family constellations? What are the drivers behind all these changes over time and in the life course? And what are the implications for inequality in society and for social policy? The Swiss Household Panel is a unique ongoing longitudinal survey that has followed a large sample of Swiss households since 1999. The data provide the rare opportunity to go beyond a snapshot of contemporary Swiss society and give insight into the processes in people's lives and in society that lie behind recent developments.

This volume analyses the quantification of the effect of factors measuring subjective well-being, and in particular on the metrics applied. With happiness studies flourishing over the last decades, both in number of publications as well as in their exposure, researchers working in this field are aware of potential weaknesses and pitfalls of these metrics. Contributors to this volume reflect on different factors influencing quantification, such as scale size, wording, language, biases, and cultural comparability in order to raise awareness on the tools and on their conditions of use.