THE IMPEDIMENT IN RE-DEFINING AFRICAN WELL-BEING

Well-being as a subject is often looked at from a Western perspective, including definitions and measurements.This, however, ignores the sociocultural characteristics of individuals or groups that may be crucial to the subjective conceptualization of well-being.The concept of well-being relates to understanding how people derive and interpret wellness regarding their interactions with other humans within the family, community and social context.This viewpoint of well-being is presented in this chapter as "holistic" from a cultural approach.The notion of well-being from an African perspective is usually defined within the framework of group norms, values, kinship relationships and ties entrenched in cultural values.The concept of well-being in this sense also runs counter to the idea of well-being in western cultures.The African is a 'group person', a 'family person' and the 'we person'.These sociocultural features are presumed to affect or influence well-being, mental health and treatment.This chapter expounds on techniques to effectively understand the culture in health from the African perspective.We submit that culturally sensitive measures of well-being will aid deeper exploration of the construct within the African setting and allow for a construct base comparison between Western and African settings