Human Suffering and Quality of Life

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

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2. Conceptualizing Human Pain and Suffering

   • Ronald E. Anderson

   Pages 1-16

3. Narrative Accounts of the Agony of Suffering

   • Ronald E. Anderson

   Pages 17-28

4. Statistical Portrait of Suffering in America

   • Ronald E. Anderson

   Pages 29-47

5. Suffering on a Global Scale

   • Ronald E. Anderson

   Pages 49-68

6. World Suffering Expands as Gaps in Care Widen

   • Ronald E. Anderson

   Pages 69-86

7. Ending Preventable Suffering: Ethics and Social Change

   • Ronald E. Anderson

   Pages 87-99

8. Back Matter

   Pages 101-105

   PDF

This briefs on human suffering adds to human understanding of suffering by contextualizing both stories and statistics on suffering, while showing that suffering adds a useful perspective to contemporary thought and research on quality of life, social well-being, and measures of societal progress. The scholarship on suffering is made more comprehensible in the book by using nine different conceptual frames that have been used for making sense of suffering. The primary focus of this work is with the last frame, the quality of life frame. Overall, this chapters show how the research on quality of life and well-being can be enhanced by embracing human suffering. ​

• Individual and Global Burden
• Integrating empirical traditions
• Integrating humanitarian traditions
• Measuring Human Suffering
• Narratives of Pain and Suffering
• Notion of Global Suffering
• Quality of Life Research and Human Suffering
• Specific Types of Suffering
• Suffering and Gender Inequality
• Suffering and Social Supports
• Thinking about Suffering
• Widening of Care Divides
• World Suffering

From the book reviews:

“Anderson’s work provides a wake-up call to those in quality of life research domains as well as a broader audience too – essentially anyone concerned with the plight of the human lot. … This book began with an ambitious goal of providing ways of thinking through the difficult and multi-dimensional issue of suffering experienced by humankind … .” (Rhonda Phillips, Applied Research Quality Life, Vol. 9, 2014)

• University of Minnesota, Wayzata, USA

  Ronald E. Anderson

Ronald (Ron) Anderson is Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota. He received his PhD in sociology from Stanford University in 1970. From 1968 until retiring in 2005, he served on the faculty of sociology at the University of Minnesota. Throughout that time, he consulted for many government agencies and corporations on survey research and technology-related issues. From 1990 to 2005, he coordinated several international studies of the social and learning effects of information technology within primary and secondary education in 20 or more countries in each study. From that and earlier work, he wrote or edited seven books and over 100 articles. Since retirement, his research interests have focused primarily on compassion and suffering. Further details on his work can be found in the following websites:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Anderson

www.soc.umn.edu/~rea/

StopSuffering.net.

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