Moral worlds of well-being and distress among young people

Journal article

To see and speak about health allows young people to make visible what matters in everyday life, including balance, connection, and vulnerability. Drawing on photonarratives and short written definitions from twenty participants aged 16–30 in Oxfordshire (UK), collected between May and August 2025, this study adopts an interpretative and visual anthropology approach to explore how experiences of feeling good or bad are represented and narrated within this particular life stage and socio-cultural context. The analysis suggests that health is understood not as a fixed state but as a relational and morally situated process embedded in everyday practices of balance, care, and connection. Three interrelated analytic logics emerge across the visual and textual materials: health as condition, associated with feelings of equilibrium and calm; being healthy as practice, described through ongoing efforts of self-care and responsibility; and feeling good or bad as experience, understood as the affective register through which health becomes meaningful. Positive images frequently depicted calm, friendship, and natural or domestic environments, while expressions of distress were less often visualised and more commonly articulated through brief verbal accounts, pointing to the moral and emotional boundaries of representation. Some participants also linked health to broader ethical concerns, connecting personal well-being to empathy and responsibility toward others. By attending to young people’s own visual and narrative expressions, the study contributes a context-sensitive and analytically differentiated account of how health and well-being are experienced, expressed, and negotiated in everyday life.

Authors: Casadó-Marín, L

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Springer
• Journal: Discover Public Health
• Volume: 23
• Issue: 1
• Article number: 794
• Publication date: 2026-05-29
• Acceptance date: 2026-05-07
• DOI: 10.1186/s12982-026-02098-4
• EISSN: 3005-0774
• ISSN: 3005-0774
• Language: English
• Keywords: Visual ethnography; Photonarratives; Youth well-being; Anthropology of health; Moral experience; Relational care