A Modern Guide to Wellbeing Research

This insightful Modern Guide explores heterodox approaches to modern wellbeing research, with a specific focus on how wellbeing is understood and practised, exploring policies and actions which are taken to shape wellbeing. It evaluates contemporary trends in wellbeing research, including the sometimes competing definitions, methods and approaches offered by different disciplinary perspectives.

Exploring the threats to wellbeing from the environments we inhabit and the situations societies create and endure, chapters particularly look at wellbeing inequalities and the experiences of marginalised groups, demonstrating the connection between wellbeing and political struggle. Provocative commentaries from leading scholars plus chapters on original theoretical developments and research studies across diverse world regions reveal wellbeing research based on situated practices, social differences and specific cultural contexts. This Modern Guide assesses the influence and impact of wellbeing research on policy and practice across a range of sectors and spaces, including: wellbeing budgeting, nature-based interventions, urban design, environmental resource management, prisons, housing, international migration, and post-conflict situations.

This will be a useful read for scholars of human geography, social policy, urban studies, anthropology, political science and environmental economics. Policy makers will also appreciate the suggestions for improvement to wellbeing policies and practices.

Edited by Beverley A. Searle, School of Social Sciences, University of Dundee, Jessica Pykett, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, and Institute for Mental Health, University of Birmingham and Maria Jesus Alfaro-Simmonds, Just Futures Centre for Child, Youth, Family and Community Research, University of Huddersfield, UK