Quality of Life and Human Well-Being in Sub-Saharan Africa (eBook)

Recent publications include Roberts, B., Gordon, S., Møller, V. & Struwig, J. (2015) Shadow of the Sun: The distribution of wellbeing in sub-Saharan Africa. In Glatzer, W. et al (Eds.) The Global Handbook of Quality of Life. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer; and Roberts, B. (2014) Beliefs About Inequality and Redress Preferences in South Africa, Social Indicators Research, 118, 1167-90.

Valerie Møller is currently Professor Emeritus of Quality of Life Studies in the Institute of Social and Economic Research at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. A sociologist by training, she earned her PhD from the University of Zürich and has lived and worked in South and Southern Africa since 1972. While employed as a social researcher at the former University of Rhodesia (1972-5), University of KwaZulu-Natal (1976-1997) and Rhodes University (since 1998), she has studied and written on many aspects of quality of life in Africa over the past 40 years. She is a long-standing member of the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies; has served as its President (2007-8) and received its lifetime achievement award in 2016. She has published some 200 research articles and chapters in books on a range of quality-of-life topics based mainly on her own empirical quantitative and qualitative research in South Africa. Edited or co-edited volumes published in Springer's Social Indicators Research and International Handbook on Quality-of-Life series include Quality of Life in South Africa (1997), Barometers of Quality of Life Around the Globe (2008), Quality of Life and the Millennium Challenge (2009), and The Global Handbook of Quality of Life (2015). In 2017, she co-authored a chapter on sub-Saharan African quality of life for the Springer volume on The Pursuit of Human Well-Being: The untold history, edited by R.J. Estes and M.J. Sirgy. She was the lead author of the regional chapter on Africa (Waiting for Happiness in Africa) that appeared in the World Happiness Report 2017 Update.