“What Else Would She Need to Be Happy?”
Exploring Women’s Perceived Capabilities for a Good Life in Rural India
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 24239710 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Satyam Raj Singh (0009-0007-5405-0539), Billie De Haas (0000-0002-9862-0114), Abhishek Singh (0000-0001-6263-4410), Shrinivas Darak (0000-0001-8493-1029), Hinke Haisma (0000-0002-9676-0463) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 100485 |
| Publication date | 2026-10-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Wellbeing Space and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2666-5581 • E-ISSN: 2666-5581 |
| Publisher | Elsevier BV (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1016/j.wss.2026.100485 |
| OpenAlex | W7223045216 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 28 |
Despite sustained policy attention to women’s wellbeing, dominant approaches often rely on individualistic and outcome-based indicators that inadequately capture how well-being and agency are shaped within households, kinship relations, and gendered social norms. Drawing on the capability approach, this paper examines how women in rural Jharkhand conceptualise a good life and exercise agency within the obligations, relationships, and moral expectations of everyday life. Based on ten focus group discussions conducted across villages engaged with a child nutrition intervention (POSHAN), and using dialogical methods with AI-generated vignettes, the study explores women’s valued priorities and everyday decision-making. The findings identify multiple valued domains of well-being, including children’s health and education, household stability, relationships with husbands and in-laws, and the capacity to fulfil caregiving responsibilities with dignity. Women articulate well-being not primarily as individual advancement, but as sustaining family welfare and moral standing within their communities. These accounts reveal how aspirations are embedded in practices of care, respect, and obligation, and how agency is exercised through negotiation within socially structured conditions. By linking women’s valued capabilities to the contexts in which they are enacted, the paper contributes to relational and situated understandings of well-being in the Global South.
good life · perceived capability · rural India · Rural women · Subjective well-being · women's happiness · Gender, Education, and Development Issues · Income, Poverty, and Inequality · Social and Economic Development in India
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From Individual to Collective Capabilities
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Reflecting on reflexive thematic analysis
Qualitative to quantitative
Measures of women's empowerment based on individual-level data
Wellbeing, place and technology
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Considerations for relational research methods for use in Indigenous contexts
Feminist Relational Agency and the Cultural Contestation of Heteronormative Gender Norms in the Indian American Diaspora
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Gender scripts and age at marriage in India
Collective capabilities, culture, and Amartya Sen’sDevelopment as Freedom
Using thematic analysis in psychology
Exploring the Relational in Relational Wellbeing
Adaptive Preferences and Capabilities
Bargaining'' and Gender Relations
The Capability Approach
Women's Autonomy in India and Pakistan
Resources, Agency, Achievements
The capability approach and the politics of a social conception of wellbeing
The Vignette Technique in Survey Research
The Relational Ontology of Amartya Sen's Capability Approach
| Highly cited | No |
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