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Warsaw 2009: Presentations and short courses

Human values and subjective well-being. A study in an Italian context

Session: Basic Human Values (II)

Authors:

Caterina Sciarra; Università degli Studi di Firenze , Italy
Maurizio Cappelli; Università degli Studi di Firenze , Italy

Abstract:

In the ambit of a quality-of-life project, firstly supposed to be used in order to help local authorities to improve their policy standards, two different surveys have been carried out in two middle small urban contexts in Italy (Fucecchio and Atri) by using the same questionnaire design. Moreover, collected data allowed researchers to investigate thoroughly the relationships between subjective well-being and human values, observed in terms of importance that each individual attach to life ambits.

In this perspective, one of the questionnaire’s areas aimed at studying human values by applying the well-known Thurstone scaling approach by asking interviewees to rank eight ambits (friendship, physical aspect, career, culture, family, earnings, social relationship and health).

The results of the analytical approach allowed us to point towards three main goals:

* testing the methodological soundness of Thurstone scaling approach in studying human values * studying the relationship between human values and subjective well-being in cross-cultural comparison. This will be done in the perspective of managing “Thurstone data” as importance weights in building complex well-being indicators (F. Maggino, 2007) * analysing differences and similarities between the two cultural contexts: data allowed us to understand how interaction between subjective well-being and human values may vary by shifting from a context to another, thought these contexts can be considered similar at a macro level.

Attachment:

Full paper: Human values and subjective well-being (110.5 KB)