Happy at Work in Africa? Measuring Hedonic Well-Being Among Water Carriers in Rural Kenya Using the Experience Sampling Method

Despite work’s importance in people’s overall sense of purpose in life, several studies measuring momentary well-being find that people are very unhappy while at work. These studies have focused on workers in industrialized countries doing paid labor in the formal sector. For a large fraction of hum...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of happiness studies Vol. 23; no. 6; pp. 2449 - 2468
Main Authors Cook, Joseph, Kabubo-Mariara, Jane, Kimuyu, Peter
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.08.2022
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Agriculture
Animal husbandry
Economics
Employment
Happiness
Households
Industrialized nations
Livestock
Personality and Social Psychology
Philosophy
Polls & surveys
Positive Psychology
Quality of Life Research
Research Paper
Rural areas
Sampling
Smartphones
Social Sciences
Wages & salaries
Water supply
Well being
Kenya
Women
Developing countries
Work
Experience sampling method
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Summary:Despite work’s importance in people’s overall sense of purpose in life, several studies measuring momentary well-being find that people are very unhappy while at work. These studies have focused on workers in industrialized countries doing paid labor in the formal sector. For a large fraction of humanity, however, “work” is smallholder farming, tending cattle and collecting water and fuelwood. We measure momentary well-being with the Experience Sampling Method in a sample of 195 subjects in rural Kenya. Subjects were the household’s main water carrier; 93% were women. Each subject was asked to complete four ESM surveys per day over eight weeks. Results from 9559 ESM records show that subjects are indeed less happy “at work”, whether that work is paid or unpaid casual labor, paid formal sector employment, or resource collection. They are also less energetic, less sociable and in more pain. We also find evidence that subjects perceive themselves as less safe while working or traveling away from home. We find a statistically significant, though small, relationship between the intercepts in the model (individual-level average momentary well-being) and the log of household wages earned over the past two weeks. The relationship is stronger with wages earned by the subject herself.
ISSN:1389-4978
1573-7780
DOI:10.1007/s10902-022-00509-2