How does subjective and objective wellbeing influence perceptions of development in rural Kenya?

Understanding wellbeing at the household level is important as this helps inform the design of poverty alleviation and development programs for developing countries. There exist both objective and subjective ways of doing this. Whereas objective measures of poverty/wellbeing have commonly been used, the subjective approach to understanding wellbeing is becoming a common phenomenon in poverty studies, with more of these being conducted in order to get the participatory appraisal of wellbeing. These subjective measures of wellbeing are becoming increasingly common because of the realization that objective (economic) measures alone are not sufficient to understand poverty and wellbeing, especially in the developing context as they have been found to be wanting. Understanding development using non-monetary factors, particularly the dynamics of socio-economic development, is also an important approach for the developing context since it accords development experts a chance to design appropriate strategies focused on the developing world context. Using both and subjective measures of wellbeing, this study investigates Makueni residents’ perceptions of development in relation to both approaches of wellbeing. This research which is on-going uses factor analysis (objective measure) and polychoric principal component analysis (subjective)