Build Well-being While Reducing Poverty

There is a world of poverty out there to alleviate. New research, however, shows that it may be just as important to work to improve the quality of life of poor people as it is to get them food, water, shelter and health care.

Only 24 percent of people classified as poor in a new study rated their life satisfaction as low, according to Mariano Rojas, a professor at Mexico's Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales. Rojas' work also showed that about 18 percent of people in the "non-poor" category also reported low life satisfaction. Rojas said that poverty alone does not define an individual's overall well-being and it is possible for someone to come out of poverty and remain less than satisfied with his life.

These intriguing findings appear in Rojas' article, Enhancing Poverty-Abatement Programs: a Subjective Well-Being Contribution, which was published online in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life.

Most aid programs have the goal of reducing poverty. Rojas points out that these program begin with the idea that rising income will give poor people greater well-being. But life satisfaction should also be taken into account, Rojas said, when evaluating poverty-abatement programs.

Using data from a yearly, national survey out of the University of Costa Rica, Rojas focused on questions about household income and dependency on household income. He also examined subjective questions about life satisfaction, as well as health, employment, family relations and friendship.

Most survey respondents rated their lives as satisfactory or better. Rojas found that a person can be satisfied with his life even if his income is low, as long as he is moderately satisfied in other areas of life such as family, self, health, job and economic conditions.

"It is possible to jump over the income poverty line with little effect on life satisfaction," Rojas writes. "There is a big risk of neglecting and underestimating the importance of well-being-enhancing factors when focusing only on income poverty. It is important to worry about getting people out of income poverty, but it is more beneficial to also worry about the additional skills people need to have a more satisfying life."

Photo courtesy of loic.schule, via Flickr