7
Well-being and Ill-being: The Good and
the Bad Life
D. Narayan, R. Chambers, M. K. Shah and P. Petesch
Well-being is Multidimensional
A better life for me is to be healthy, peaceful and to live in love without hunger.
Love is more than anything. Money has no value in the absence of love.A 26-year-old woman, Dibdibe Wajtu, EthiopiaThe starting question posed by the researchers to the small group discussions with
poor women and poor men is, ‘How do you define well-being or a good quality of
life, and ill-being or a bad quality of life?’ From these discussions emerge local
people’s own terminology and definitions of well-being, deprivation, ill-being, vul-
nerability and poverty. The terms well-being and ill-being were chosen for their
open-ended breadth, so that poor people would feel free to express whatever they
felt about a good life and a bad life. ‘We are trying to present a new way of seeing
well-being’, notes a researcher. It is the way poor people see it themselves.
Poor people’s ideas of a good quality of life are multidimensional. As explored
in Part I of this chapter, they cluster around the following themes: material well-
being, physical well-being, social well-being, security, and freedom of choice and
action. All of these combine pervasively in states of mind as well as body, in per-
sonal psychological experiences of well-being. Much of ill-being was described as
the opposite of these. Part II examines these dimensions in turn: material depriva-
tion; physical ill-being; bad social relations; vulnerability, worry and fear, low self-
confidence; and powerlessness, helplessness and frustration. Part III describes the
psychological dimensions of well-being and ill-being. In describing the conditions
of their lives, poor children especially express resentment.
Reprinted from Narayan D, Chambers R, Shah M K and Petesch P. 2000. Wellbeing and illbeing: The
good and the bad life. In Narayan D et al (eds) Voices of the Poor: Crying Out for Change. Oxford Uni-
versity Press, Oxford, chapter 2, pp21–43. By permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.