Researching Happiness

Abstract

This book offers unique insights into happiness and wellbeing as well as the challenges facing happiness researchers. A wide range of academics discuss their ethnographic, biographical and life history projects illustrating some of the difficulties of developing critical, qualitative approaches to wellbeing research. The book focuses on the everyday social practices around wellbeing that have often been neglected by happiness research, offering intriguing insights into the often hidden world of the research process. Contributors explore some of the problems they encountered doing their research and the techniques they developed to overcome them. It explores issues such as: how to operationalise definitions of happiness in ethnographic research? How to conduct happiness research in different cultural contexts? How to interview participants about social class, gender and happiness? How to relate notions such as structure and agency, biography and the life course to happiness research? How can visual materials be used with interviewees to explore happiness experiences? What theories can we use to study happiness in qualitative research? This combination of research findings and methodological insight will ensure the text appeals to a diverse readership from undergraduate students to academic researchers in the social sciences.