Subjective Wellbeing in Rural and Urban Central Europe: Evidence from the European Social Survey (2008 and 2018)

Abstract

Social surveys on wellbeing have been increasingly including measures of subjective wellbeing, alongside more often used objective ones, as they show the importance of a more comprehensive approach to understanding what constitutes good and happy lives. This paper relies on the European Social Survey (ESS) data from Round 4 (2008) and Round 9 (2018) to analyze and compare subjective wellbeing (SWB) in rural and urban areas of eight Central European countries: Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, and Slovakia. Based on available ESS items, we have constructed a more concise version of the VanderWeele et al.’s Flourishing Index, which we termed the Subjective Wellbeing Index (SWI), and which includes the following domains: (1) happiness and life satisfaction, (2) mental and physical health, and (3) financial and material stability. The main results indicate that all eight CE countries have relatively high and improving SWI scores, but stable relational position over the ten-year period. When looking at the rural-urban subsamples, all countries scored higher on the SWI in urban areas in 2008, with significant improvements in the rural areas of more affluent EU countries by 2018 as Austrian, Czech and German rural areas exhibited higher SWI scores than their urban counterparts.

Keywords:

• Subjective wellbeing
• Flourishing Index
• rural areas
• Central Europe
• European Social Survey (ESS)

Disclosure statement

This research was conducted as part of the project SECRURAL funded by Croatian Science Foundation (UIP-2019-04-5257). The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose. The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article. All authors certify that they have no affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with any financial interest or non-financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript. The authors have no financial or proprietary interests in any material discussed in this article.

Notes

1 As this study focuses on subjective wellbeing, feeling about household income is adequate to be used in this research. We are, however, aware that feeling about household income, is not completely correlated with nation’s levels of economic development nor it is an objective measurement of a person’s (or household’s) income levels, but rather a subjective one.

2 All data were weighted by pspwght (the post-stratified design weight which is usually used for cross-country comparisons).

3 It needs to be stated that even though ESS contains a large number of variables that could be also included as potential predictors (other individual characteristics and indices), because of our main research goals and the scope of the paper we decided to include only these. In Limitations and suggestions for further research we state which additional predictors can be potentially included in future research on subjective wellbeing in CE.

4 M stands for mean; SD for standard deviation; MIN for minimum result; and MAX for maximum result on variable within the country.

5 f stands for frequency – actual number of respondents (count), while in brackets we present the percentages (%) within the country.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vladimir Ivanović

Vladimir Ivanović is a research assistant in the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb. His research is focused on rural life, wellbeing, quality of life and environmental movements and attitudes.

Bruno Šimac

Bruno Šimac is a research assistant in the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb. His research is focused on urban and rural migrations, youth and gender issues.

Tijana Trako Poljak

Tijana Trako Poljak is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb. Her research is focused on environmental sociology, symbolic construction of identity, rural sociology and Croatia and Central/South-East Europe.