ISQOLS educational grant 

I am Shoirakhon Nurdinova, an educational grant recipient. I am grateful that I have received an educational grant which made enable me to trip to the International Society for Quality of Life Studies conference. I attended at ISQOLS Conference in Granada, Spain with my presentation entitled “Are Turkish Housewives Happy?: A Qualitative Approach”. My presentation focused on happiness of Turkish housewives, whom I conducted semi-structured interviews. The interviews with 60 housewives from different regions of Turkey explores factors affecting women’s decisions to/to not participate in labour market, and their happiness level. The presentation allowed me to introduce my research findings to ISQOLS members and conference participants  and expand my academic network.

 I enjoyed to other participants’ presentations, in particular on wellbeing/happiness of working/non-working women. Carina Keldenich’s presentation “Happy Homemakers or Desperate Housewives? Work, Parenthood and Women’s Affective Well-Being” was quite close to my topic.

ISQOLS conference was very important for networking on my research and future career. Networking is beneficial for me in sharing information, getting in touch with experts in terms of scientific collaborations and developing research ideas.  Furthermore, networks influence me positively to improve new skills and to make scientific achievements in my future entire academic career. Feedbacks of experts improved my future scientific approaches. Also, ISQOLS conference was good opportunity to stay up to date with current best practices and cutting edge methodologies in the field.

Another beneficial part of the event was ISQOLS mentor mixer program, which provide young ISQOLS members with experienced mentors. I am lucky that I met my mentor Prof. Ming-Chang Tsai. We discussed about my future career goals, research interests, publishing opportunities etc. during mentor mixer program. Also, we discussed about my future research on happiness in Central Asia, which is quite new research area in Central Asia. I believe that mentorship program would be helpful me to develop more effective tools and methodologies on happiness economics, quality-of-life-studies in Central Asian Countries.

ISQOLS conference gave me motivation and a new perspective on my work and research.

Yours faithfully, Shoirakhon Nurdinova