Johnson on Measuring Well-being during ISQOLS 2024 in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia.
09 July 2024
During the 22nd International Society of Quality-of-Life Studies (ISQOLS) that took place in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia, our PhD student, Johnson Kansiime, was honoured to present part of his ongoing doctoral work titled “Revitalizing Rural Well-being: A Novel Approach with the Index of Well-being (IoW).” Co-authored with our project leader, Antje Jantsch this research project purposes to construct an index of well-being that is theoretically grounded and relevant for contemporary policy. As a key highlight, preliminary results from the dual’s work suggest that measures that focus on averages and those that capture the joint distribution of well-being across the population have sizable differences, with the former tending to be overly inflated. Using well-being measures that end about averages to inform policy can thus be misleading as they outrightly ignore people at the lower end of the well-being spectrum. Johnson described his experience of doing the first oral presentation at an International Conference as rewarding and reassuring. He thanked conference participants for being such a great audience that they offered invaluable feedback, and his supervisor and coauthor Antje Jantsch for the regular guidance and support. Johnson is also immensely grateful to the German Academic Exchange Service for funding his trip through a grant he won earlier this year.