Well-Being as a Multidimensional Concept highlights 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 from a multidisciplinary group of contributors, including distinguished, widely celebrated senior experts as well as emerging voices in the fields of health promotion, health research, clinical practice, community engagement, and health system policy. Using a social science approach, the contributors explore the interface among culture, community, and well-being in terms of theory and research frameworks; culture, community, and relationships; food; health systems; and collaboration, policy, messaging, and data. The chapters in this collection provide a broader understanding of well-being and its role as a culturally embedded and multidimensional concept. This collection furthers our ability to apprehend social and cultural constructs and dynamics that influence health and well-being and to better understand factors that contribute to or prevent health disparities.

“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.

Understanding Wellbeing is an accessible introduction to the concept of wellbeing and its relevance to areas of health and social policy. Understanding Wellbeing provides students, professionals and practitioners of health and social care with the essential resources for understanding and promoting wellbeing. The book includes case studies, activities and reflection points to engage the reader with both the theory and its practical application. The book provides an overview of the concept of wellbeing and its relationship with and role in health, including: Psychological aspects of wellbeing — mind/body influences, psychology, spirituality Physical aspects of wellbeing — food, exercise, genetics, health promotion Social approaches to wellbeing — social policy, culture, environment, housing, education, information The Editors: Anneyce Knight is Senior Lecturer at Bournemouth University The late Allan McNaught was Principal Lecturer at the University of Greenwich. The authors are a multi-professional group of health academics with considerable national and international experience across the statutory and non-statutory sectors.

​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.

School, apart from being a place of education and transmission of new knowledge, should also be a place of personal development and enhancement of students' well-being and mental resilience, while protecting mental health and preventing teacher burnout. The current covid-19 pandemic has made the need for psychological support for students and teachers more urgent than ever. The science of positive psychology has offered many tools and methods that are particularly effective in the school environment and in educational contexts in general. New tools, methods, and practices are needed to enhance the well-being and psychological resilience of students, teachers, and parents in a time of challenges such as the current pandemic and inflation that cause stress, uncertainty, and an increase in psychopathology.

This edited volume aims to better understand the multifaceted phenomenon we call health. Going beyond simple views of health as the absence of disease or as complete well-being, this book unites scientists and philosophers. The contributions clarify the links between health and adaptation, robustness, resilience, or dynamic homeostasis, and discuss how to achieve health and healthy aging through practices such as hormesis. The book is divided into three parts and a conclusion: the first part explains health from within specific disciplines, the second part explores health from the perspective of a bodily part, system, function, or even the environment in which organisms live, and the final part looks at more clinical or practical perspectives. It thereby gathers, across 30 chapters, diverse perspectives from the broad fields of evolutionary and systems biology, immunology, and biogerontology, more specific areas such as odontology, cardiology, neurology, and public health, as well as philosophical reflections on mental health, sexuality, authenticity and medical theories. The overarching aim is to inform, inspire and encourage intellectuals from various disciplines to assess whether explanations in these disparate fields and across biological levels can be sufficiently systematized and unified to clarify the complexity of health. It will be particularly useful for medical graduates, philosophy graduates and research professionals in the life sciences and general medicine, as well as for upper-level graduate philosophy of science students.

Throughout the history of European integration, economic wealth has increased to the benefit of citizens in the European Union (EU). However, inequalities in well-being persist within and between Europe’s regions, undermining the legitimacy of the EU in the eyes of citizens. This book investigates how the EU can use its regional funding programmes in ways that increase citizen well-being. The book shows that while EU social investments improve labour market performance in rich regions, they exacerbate income inequality in poor regions. Based on this insight, the book presents a theory on the conditions under which EU funding will enhance well-being. Crucially, it argues the case for enhancing the inclusivity of EU growth, which yields the promise of a more legitimate and stronger union.

Diverse driving forces, processes and actors are responsible for different trends in the development of megacities and large urban areas. Under the dynamics of global change, megacities are themselves changing: On the one hand they are prone to increasing socio-economic vulnerability due to pronounced poverty, socio-spatial and political fragmentation, sometimes with extreme forms of segregation, disparities and conflicts. On the other hand megacities offer positive potential for global transformation, e.g. minimisation of space consumption, highly effective use of resources, efficient disaster prevention and health care options – if good strategies were developed. At present in many megacities and urban areas of the developing world and the emerging economies the quality of life is eroding. Most of the megacities have grown to unprecedented size, and the pace of urbanisation has far exceeded the growth of the necessary infrastructure and services. As a result, an increasing number of urban dwellers are left without access to basic amenities like clean drinking water, fresh air and safe food. Additionally, social inequalities lead to subsequent and significant intra-urban health inequalities and unbalanced disease burdens that can trigger conflict and violence between subpopulations. The guiding idea of our book lies in a multi- and interdisciplinary approach to the complex topic of megacities and urban health that can only be adequately understood when different disciplines share their knowledge and methodological tools to work together. We hope that the book will allow readers to deepen their understanding of the complex dynamics of urban and megacity populations through the lens of public health, geographical and other research perspectives.

This book focuses on interdisciplinary issues of human health in the changing urban environments of India’s largest megacities—Delhi and Mumbai. The authors explore human health concerns related to increased temperatures and air pollution in these cities in a study based on primary data collected through interviews, as well as secondary data on causes of mortality from 2001 to 2012. During this period, the surface temperatures for both megacities were mapped using Landsat Images. The rapidly increasing populations of cities and urban centers alter ecosystem services such as water, air and land cover, with disastrous impacts on health and wellbeing, particularly in megacities. In 2015, polluted air was estimated to have been responsible for 6.4 million deaths worldwide, and it is projected that it will cause between 6 and 9 million deaths per year by 2060. In 2017, outdoor air pollution resulted in 1.2 million deaths in India and brought about a 3% loss in GDP. The increase in population, vehicles, and industries has led to changes in land use and land cover and a rise in city temperatures and air pollution, creating urban heat islands (UHIs). Together, UHIs and air pollution have damaging impacts on human health that range from stress and headache to asthma, bronchitis, and chronic diseases, and even to death. Delhi has been experiencing emergency conditions in terms of environmental health over the past two years. At the same time, both the Delhi and Mumbai urban agglomerations are growing at a rapid pace, and the United Nations has projected that they will be the second and third most populous cities in the world by 2025. In this context, the book offers significant insights into the past patterns and responses to the present global urban health emergencies, and explores sustainable means of combating the problem to enable college and university researchers to develop innovative solutions. Further. It presents trans-disciplinary research that cuts across the WHO Action Plan, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, and Habitat III to help policymakers gain a better understanding of the global challenges of urban health and wellbeing. The book is especially useful for students and researchers in geography, urban demography, urban studies, environmental studies, health sciences, and policy studies.

In 150 years Italy transformed itself from a poor and backward country into one where living standards are among the highest in the world. In Measuring Wellbeing, Giovanni Vecchi provides an innovative analysis of this change by drawing on family accounts that provide engaging insights into life and are the "micro" data that create the foundations for the "macro" picture of variations and fluctuations in the development of Italy. Vecchi provides a nuanced account of the changes. He emphasizes that the concept of wellbeing is multidimensional and must include non-monetary aspects of life: nutrition, health and education, as well as less tangible elements such as freedom or the possibility to exercise one's political rights. The book deals with this polyhedral nature of wellbeing. Among the insights are that Italians succeeded in combining growth with equity, but that the gap between the North and South did not narrow; the while longevity has increased, education has not improved as much as it could have; and that for close to three decades, Italy's virtuous path has come to a halt: the wellbeing of the Italian people is at the crossroads between progress and decline. Measuring Wellbeing engagingly combines a unique dataset and an innovative statistical method that can be adapted to other countries.