1st Edition
Happiness, Wellbeing and Society What Matters for Singaporeans
As Singapore continues to grow as a nation, the happiness and wellbeing of Singaporeans and what matters to them also change. This book conceptualizes and measures the cognitive and affective aspects of subjective wellbeing from multiple perspectives and relates these to important factors such as values, trust, democratic rights, views about politics and the role of the government. Through nationwide surveys using representative samples, including insights from the most recent 2016 Quality of Life (QOL) Survey, this book examines how happiness and subjective wellbeing have evolved over the past 20 years in Singapore.
This book is an invaluable resource for those interested in how the study of happiness and wellbeing in Singapore connects with and contributes to the ongoing research and discourse on happiness and wellbeing around the world.
1. Introduction, Context and Research Methodology
2. Subjective Wellbeing (I): Satisfaction with Life, Life Domains and Living in Singapore
3. Subjective Wellbeing (II): Happiness, Enjoyment, Achievement, and Other Aspects
4. Does Money Buy Happiness in Singapore?
5. Values and their Influence on Singaporeans’ Subjective Wellbeing
6. Clustering of Singaporeans
7. Trust and Social Capital: Nurturing a Conducive Environment for Wellbeing
8. Rights, Politics and the Role of the Government
9. Conclusion
Biography
Siok Kuan Tambyah is Associate Professor at the NUS Business School, National University of Singapore. Her research interests include consumption and identity, ethnicity, gender, luxury consumption, consumer culture, values and lifestyles, and cross-cultural consumer behavior. In addition to journal articles on consumer behavior, services marketing and quality of life, she has co-authored three books on values, lifestyles and wellbeing in Singapore.
Soo Jiuan Tan is Associate Professor at the NUS Business School, National University of Singapore. Her research is in the areas of international market entry strategies, consumer values and lifestyles, parallel importing, game theoretic applications in marketing and new product management. She has published in leading international journals and is also the co-author of five books: Seven Faces of Singaporeans, Competing for Markets: Growth Strategies for SMEs, Understanding Singaporeans: Values, Lifestyles, Aspirations and Consumption Behaviors, The Wellbeing of Singaporeans, and Happiness and Wellbeing: The Singaporean Experience.
'The Singaporean duo on quality of life research have done it again in delivering the most comprehensive and updated profile of Singaporeans and the Singaporean society. The book delivers it with well-thought-out questionnaires from 1996, 2001, 2011 and 2016, and with the analytic lucidity and force that are characteristic of this duo, whose first names, Soo Jiuan and Siok Kuan, mean the same. The pronounced strength of this book is that it organizes the text with the question "what matters for Singaporeans" and presents analyses from the level of individual responses to that of societal features quite seamlessly, thus nicely capturing the evolution of Singapore with its time-tested resilience after the Global Crisis in 2008. It is hoped that Singapore and Southeast Asia would be a model of QOL resilience to the rest of the world.' — Takashi Inoguchi, Eminent Scholar-Professor, Institute of Asian Cultures, J. F. Oberlin University, Japan
'Based on the latest 2016 Quality of Life (QOL) survey conducted in Singapore, this book comprehensively examines and summarizes the important dimensions (e.g., money, values, trust) that are related to Singaporeans’ subjective well-being. Comparisons to earlier QOL surveys (conducted in 1996, 2001, and 2011) enable the authors to analyze how Singaporeans’ subjective well-being has changed over the last two decades. The book not only includes invaluable data on happiness in Singapore, but also encompasses a thorough review of the latest literature, as the authors synthesize the findings from various works to provide an insightful perspective of the links between some of these key factors and subjective well-being.' — Associate Professor Ng Wei Ting, Head, Master of Applied Research in Social Sciences (MRESS), Singapore University of Social Sciences
