Brian Beadle, Antje Jantsch and Johnson Kansiime on modelling well-being using Bayesian Multidimensional Item Response Theory

10 July 2024

The ISQOLS Annual conference has always been a valuable platform for us at RuWell to share our research ideas and work in progress and get much-valued feedback; this year’s event in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, was no exception. Our colleague Johnson Kansiime came through with yet another presentation from their collaboration with scientific acquaintance Brian Beadle and our project leader Antje Jantsch. Among other aspects, the project proposes an alternative way of assessing well-being by drawing from Amartya Sen’s capability approach and investigating who has the capability for well-being as opposed to who has well-being. Fascinated by this approach to well-being conceptualisation and measurement, the audience engaged in an active discussion, providing very useful comments and suggestions that, the trio, will now work on before the final manuscript can be written. The presenter, Johnson, described the presentation as captivating owing to the lively debate that featured the question-and-answer session. We are eager and excited to see how far the trio goes with this interesting project, especially after the invaluable feedback from the 2024 ISQOLS Annual Conference.