The paper offers an analysis of how to operationalize the development goal of promoting well-being, and provides an exemplar. It focuses on one element of a comprehensive methodology to operationalize empirical research into the social and cultural construction of well-being in developing countries. This research uses a definition of well-being that combines objective and subjective dimensions and locates these in the social and cultural relationships of particular societies. We focus here on the Resources and Needs Questionnaire (RANQ), a research instrument specifically developed for this work. This explores the relationships between the resources that households command and the levels of needs satisfaction which household members experience. Preliminary analysis of data for Bangladesh and Peru identifies a number of significant relationships between the distribution of resources that households command and the levels of needs satisfaction they achieve. These outcome results then represent a foundation for further analysis using complementary qualitative and process-oriented data.