newsletter Vol3 no1 april 2005

-Researching Quality of Life in Developing Countries

-Wellbeing and the Millennium Development Goals

-WeD News: Conferences, Workshops, Books and Reviews

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Researching Quality of Life in Developing Countries
Laura Camfield

Subjective ‘quality of life’, namely how people experience and evaluate their lives, is an important part of WeD’s exploration of the social and cultural construction of wellbeing in developing countries. But what is subjective ‘quality of life’? How can we understand the quality of life of people in developing countries? In Britain, at least in popular culture, we have a common sense understanding of what quality of life means which enables us to talk about the effect a new job will have on our quality of life, to compare one person’s quality of life with another, or even respond to a researcher’s questions about our quality of life.

Perhaps it’s easier to say what quality of life isn’t: It isn’t whether you feel happy or sad at a particular moment, though this can be very influential on your judgement of quality of life (as can the weather, apparently, according to Kahneman and Schkade). Usually it isn’t just one thing, even money, so we describe quality of life as ‘multi-dimensional’. It isn’t something that can be judged from outside, even by a close friend. Most importantly, it cannot be externally defined, or at least when it is, there’s always space for someone to say ‘no, that’s not my quality of life you’re measuring’.

How then can we explore and measure it?

WeD’s approach to quality of life is to move continually between ‘universal’ theories about the way the world is, or implicitly should be, to ‘local’ realities. This enables us to explore what people value, or what they feel gives quality to their lives. These understandings are then compared with the ideas of philosophers, policy makers, and people working in development, with the aim of understanding the differences and disjunctures between what ‘we’ think is good for ‘them’ and what people want for themselves and their families, in order to bring them closer together.

Our quality of life research is divided into three phases; the first was to understand how different people in different places characterise quality of life. This entailed exploratory data collection using a mix of methods ranging from semi-structured interviews to reports from our field researchers living in the sites (‘participant observation’). This enabled us to explore relationships between quality of life at different levels, for example, the individual and their community. The first phase of fieldwork took place in 24 rural, peri-urban, and urban sites in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Thailand and Peru. It included men and women at different stages of their lives, for example students and grandmothers, with a range of identities and experiences.

The second phase involved analysing the data and reflecting on what we had learned. We also tried to integrate our findings into the WeD theoretical framework and explore how they connected to other ideas about quality of life and subjective wellbeing. As a result we adopted the following definition of quality of life:

The outcome of the gap between people’s goals and perceived resources, in the context of their environment, culture, values, and experiences

This brings together the World Health Organisation’s emphasis on a ‘flesh and blood’ person in a particular socio-cultural environment with the idea that people’s quality of life is determined by the ‘gap’ between their expectations and their reality, as Calman has argued.
There are obviously a number of gaps that are important to people, for example, between yourself and your neighbours (‘keeping up with the Jones’), or between what you have and what you feel you deserve. However, we have chosen to focus on the gap between what people want to do or be and the resources they have to achieve this, as this is the most relevant to international development research and intervention.

Following a week’s workshop with our international collaborators we then compiled a plan for the remainder of the quality of life fieldwork. This will involve the development of a ‘suite’ of measures called the WeD-QoL, based on the above definition. The WeD-QoL includes measures of the following:

· What people want to do or be in order to feel that they are living a good life (their goals)
· What they think they have or can draw on to enable them to achieve this (their ‘perceived’ resources)
· How satisfied they are with the way their resources enable them to fulfil their goals
· How satisfied they are with their life as a whole
· What they value
· Whether they experience more ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ emotions

Most of these measures have been developed using the responses to the interview and focus group questions asked in the first phase, but we have also adapted international measures of ‘life satisfaction’ (from Diener) and feelings or mood (from Watson). These will enable us to compare the happiness and life satisfaction of people from the WeD sample with those from other studies. We will also be able to analyse the results of the WeD-QoL alongside other WeD data so that we can look at the relationships between people’s quality of life and what they earn or buy (Income and Expenditure Survey), or between the resources they have reported (Resources and Needs Questionnaire) and what they perceive to be their resources.

WeD recognises a number of aspects to the quality of life research that need to be kept in balance. Firstly the need to take a ‘grounded’ and pragmatic approach to quality of life, that connects what people in communities are experiencing and the way they perceive their experiences, with how these are measured by experts and policy makers outside the community. Secondly, the need to preserve the concept’s holism and rich theoretical and philosophical history, stretching back to Aristotle and the Buddha.

The first aspect is expressed in the design of the WeD-QoL, which was particularly influenced by the results of the fieldwork in Peru. The Peruvian team approached the abstract idea of quality of life by looking at what people wanted to do or be in order to feel that they were living a good life. Let’s take the example of being a successful farmer. To achieve this, people needed a range of resources from the latest agricultural equipment to a large, healthy family who could work in the fields. They also needed support, for example, from relatives or a local farmers’ association. Personality traits like being cheerful or generous were also valuable because they helped them maintain good relationships within their family and community. These relationships were both enjoyable in themselves and the best way of getting help at harvest time. The team also asked people to talk about their happiest and unhappiest memories to get a personal sense of what was important to people and what types of experience affected the quality of their lives.

The Peruvian researchers found that while there weren’t any goals that were applicable to all people in all sites (i.e. universal), they could talk about universal ‘tendencies’ like needing food, shelter, a partner, and a family. The same thing applied to resources where everyone mentioned the importance of communication, good relationships, social connections, and being able to barter and sell their produce. Typically people got support from their families (which included friends and neighbours in urban and peri-urban communities), the government, local charities, and the church. The only personality traits or ways of behaving that were valued by everyone were helping each other and being a hard worker. Interestingly, while the ‘modern’ ideals of being ‘progressive’ and a ‘professional’ were important to people from peri-urban and urban sites they were never mentioned by villagers.

The findings from Peru connect with themes identified in other countries, which also found significant differences between the perspectives of men and women of different ages, locations, socio-economic backgrounds, ethnicities, and religions. The most important areas of life for people in all countries appear to be your close relationships (family, ‘natal’ family, and partner), followed by material wellbeing (your income, assets, whether your basic needs are satisfied, the environment of your home and community, and your access to local services), and relationships with your community and the wider world (for example, relatives living in the cities or overseas and the regional government). Religion (for example, believing in God or the human potential for enlightenment, conducting acts of worship, and living ethically) appeared to be very important in Bangladesh and Thailand and fairly important in Ethiopia. Similarly, education for themselves and their children was a priority for people in Bangladesh and Ethiopia, although not in Thailand or Peru (except in peri-urban areas).

So what does this tell us about quality of life? When we look at the responses from Peru alongside those from Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Thailand, we can see that the basic ingredients of a good life are very similar. For example, having a partner, a family (and a support network that extends beyond it), a good home, a pleasant environment, and enough money or other resources not to have to worry about meeting the daily needs of your family. But the types of ‘ingredient’ (rice in Thailand or teff in Ethiopia) and the way they are combined (rice porridge or injera bread) produce very different ‘recipes’ for a good life. Similarly, a comparison of responses to questions about people’s goals from Ethiopia and Bangladesh (both low income countries) suggest that the main priorities for people from Bangladesh are maintaining family harmony, getting salaried employment, and being educated, while for people in Ethiopia they are having your own home, enough to eat and drink, and being respected by your neighbours.

Curiously the greatest differences are not between people from different countries but between men and women of different ages whose different identities or experiences cause them to value very different things. For example, in Thailand the older generation wanted to be healthy and able to attend the temple, while young men wanted good jobs and motorbikes. Similarly, young men in Bangladesh were the only group whose hopes for the future focused on themselves (‘becoming rich’), rather than the happiness and prosperity of their children. WeD’s task will be to investigate how the diversity of responses to the quality of life research can be used to help local decision-making and inform wider policy that can better fulfil its promise of improving people’s quality of life.

Laura Camfield is a WeD Research Officer, Psychology, at the University of Bath.