Combining methods (and researchers) to investigate religion and wellbeing in India

This chapter brings together two large, connected research projects on wellbeing. The first was a four- country study entitled ‘Wellbeing in Developing Countries’ (WeD), which used the lens of wellbeing to help understand the persistence of poverty. The authors were closely involved in the Bangladesh country study which ran from 2002 until 2010. This chapter focuses on the second project called ‘Religions and Development’ (RaD) which ran from 2005 until 2010. This second programme developed WeD’s combined methods of surveys and semi- structured interviews in important ways to further probe into the connections between religion and wellbeing.