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Paper short abstract:

In Surguja, India, women extend their agency in the family through the moral navigation of wellbeing, while also being constrained by moral assessment. Such insights depend on in-depth qualitative methods and show their value in complementing quantitative-derived perspectives in wellbeing research.

Paper long abstract:

The Wellbeing in Developing Countries (WeD) research programme, 2002-7, showed relationships at the centre of wellbeing. This raises two questions: what form do these relationships take, and how do we best research them?

An earlier study in Zambia suggests ‘moral navigation’ shapes the conduct of inter-household kin-based relationships (White and Jha, 2021). This paper explores moral navigation in India within the household, an arena particularly subject to moral scrutiny. Initial conversations and quantitative surveys presented an idealised version of family relationships, reflecting the strong cultural script of how families ought to be.

Deeper qualitative exploration showed how this script is made and re-made through everyday practice, revealing far more diverse interpretations of what constitutes the moral, and myriad ways in which women express agency. These are often couched in the conventional terms of being ideal wives and mothers, even as they extend the definitions of these ideals. The elasticity of women’s room for manoeuvre is both limited and enabled by others’ evaluation of their moral claims.

Studies such as this provide an important counter-balance to the predominance of quantitative methods in contemporary studies of wellbeing, which construct a technical subject which can be produced through the assembly of appropriate components, and be assessed against universal criteria. In-depth qualitative methods instead reveal contextually grounded, relational subjects, whose wellbeing is governed by moral rather than technical concerns. Limitations are also indicated in using numerical scores to assess areas of life that are subject to particularly strong cultural and moral freight.