Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw Central Statistical Offi ce, Poland
The well-being eff ect of the cross-border neighbourhood for communities and households in Subcarpathian and Lviv regions: a comparative spatial approach
Paper peer-reviewed by Prof. Marek Lisiecki, PhD
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Summary
The main goal of the study was to explore the relationship between community and in- dividual wellbeing accounting for the specifi city of its context which is the residential neighbourhood area along the Polish-Ukrainian border (within 50 km of the both sides, compared to the outside of this area). The major objective of the study was to empirically verify implications of the general hypothesis - and of the opinion gaining popularity and evidence - that ‘location/border matters’ for both individual and community well-being due to the formal and informal cross-border economic activities. The question about the role of ‘place’ and ‘space’ in aff ecting the quality of life and well-being - whether or not the concentration of similar values (well-being) in space or clustering among individuals (households) and localities (gminas) is taking place - need to be extended by an analysis of the issue of cross-level interaction between the community and individual (subjective) measures of well-being, using data from two types of sources:
a) Local Data Bank (Poland) and the Rayon Database (Ukraine) to characterize the level of (under)development (local deprivation), and
b) data from the survey of households in Subcarpathian and Lviv selected com- munes (powiats and disctricts).
The results can be summarized by emphasizing the validity of the view that the ‘bor- der residential neighbourhood’ has a signifi cant impact on individual and community well-being, and on interactions between them. Some caution must be stressed, however, in drawing the conclusions for policy purposes given a narrow scope of this (pilot-type not representative) study. But the methodological advantages due to employing a spatial approach opt for its further pursuance in this context, in a comparative perspective.
Introduction: background and problem
The growing interest in cross-border areas from both research and policy standpoints refl ects their increasing importance in a variety of roles (‘functionalities’), which this type of location can play. Especially in the context of local development, and recently also as a border residential neighbourhood aff ecting living conditions and the individual/
household subjective well-being of inhabitants, and local community well-being (Lee et al., 2015; Okrasa et al., 2015, Cierpiał-Wolan, 2017). However, the question about their
exceptionality in the last role, and how the two types of well-being relate to each other in this particular kind of place, belong to relatively less recognized, only lately becom- ing an object of conceptual systematization and empirical analysis (Lee and Kim, 2015;
Okrasa 2013, 2017; Philips and Wong, 2017). These impediments are due to the multifac- eted nature of the processes occurring at both the micro- (individual and household) and mezzo-level (local community) implying the need to analyse between-level interactions and infl uences while accounting for ‘spatial eff ects’ (Corrado and Fingleton, 2011; Arcaya, 2012; Subramanian, 2010; Sampson, 2003). On the one hand, it calls for an interdiscipli- nary approach - (new) economic geography, socio-economics and geographical sociol- ogy, urban and regional studies, spatial econometrics and spatial statistics, to mention a few. On the other, despite the growing supply of such data, including geo-referenced data (individual data records with X, Y coordinates) the creation of an adequate mul- ti-source / multi-level analytical database (e.g., Multi-Level Integrated Database Ap- proach/MIDA - see Smith 2007) provides several methodological and organizational (or even administrative) problems (D’Orazio et al., 2006).
The problem of individual and community wellbeing interaction has policy implications as well. In particular, whether or not people’s overall feeling and the level of their satis- faction from life can be predicted from the knowledge of the quality of their living sur- rounding, i.e. of the level of local development or deprivation. And if so, how important the place and space for these measures are and, hypothetically, for the way the two types of well-being interact, especially in the cross-border environment, for which some more specifi c (working) hypotheses are formulated and tested empirically below.
The preliminary results of the analysis shown in general more similar patterns of depend- encies of subjective well-being among households located ‘within 50 km’ border areas than among households within a country ‘outside the borderland’. However, it was the household vulnerability status rather than proximity/distance - within/outside 50 km of the border location - that play a relatively more important role in aff ecting several as- pects of well-being. An explicitly spatial analysis evinces a tendency to clustering among households by particular measures of well-being (substantial autocorrelation, using Moran’s I).
The paper is structured as follows. After providing (in the next section) a brief method- ological description of the study - including a characterization of the data and measures employed - questions related to the infl uence of the objective and also the subjective fea- tures of the local community (within and outside of the 50 km) on individual (subjective)
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well-being are explored. This analysis was extended toward identifying the role played by particular factors in aff ecting household well-being (specifi cally in border residential neighbourhood) and was attempted in the following section, using multinomial logistic regression models. Following (hypothetical) supposition that the community-level var- iables, especially such as local (under)development / deprivation, do not operate in an empty space, in separation from the household-level socio-economic and demographic characteristics, in the subsequent section results of the regression multivariate models (by the OLS method), complemented by the spatial regression model are discussed. Re- marks addressing both research and policy-relevant issues conclude this paper.
Methodological framework - data and measures
To address the problem of interaction between individual (household) and community well-being as a cross-level phenomena taking place in specifi c type of area (border res- idential neighbourhood) a multilevel modelling accounting for spatial eff ects would be the best suited approach (Okrasa, 2017; Subramanian op cit., Acraya op cit., Smith op cit.).
However, in the analysis constrained by the small scope of research (instead of having hierarchical ‘nested’ data structure) the above frame was possible to be implemented also on limited scope. In addition, the issue of between-level relationships becomes further complicated due to the involvement - next to the micro-macro (or mezzo-) unit distinc- tion - diff erent, subjective and objective measures of well-being. Combining the type of unit and the nature of measure with the nature of goods/objects yields a typology of possible measures (and sources of data), as in Tab. 1 (Okrasa 2014).
There are two types, two-level data used in the analysis. Household level data are from a small-scale survey of adult members of randomly selected 410 households in 13 gminas (communes) of Subcarpathian province, and 387 households selected in an analogous way in 8 districts of Lviv oblast (one person per household). They provided information on several aspects of subjective well-being, along with important socio-demographic characteristics.
This information was complemented by data from public statistics, collected by local (gmina’s) authority in Poland, the Local Data Bank (LDB), and by the local (district’s) au- thority in Ukraine, Rayon Database (RD). They were used to construct indicators of the level of (under)development or local deprivation - see below. [Occasionally, one of the central provinces (Mazovian) is included into analysis as a reference area (‘intra’ country)
in testing the null hypothesis on the lack of a spatial/border eff ect for the between-level interaction of the well-being measures].
Table 1. Typology of the relevant data by the type of measures and the nature of goods (material – non-material), and the level of the unit.
Types of goods and units of analysis
Measures of Well-being
Objective Subjective
Material
Individual:
Persons /Households
Income, expenditures, housing conditions, etc., [e.g. household surveys)
Appraisal of living conditions, etc.
(for instance, subjective poverty measures) – survey data Group:
Local Community /neighbourhood (gmina)
Local resources and/
or deprivation – administrative/local data, Local Data Bank
Aspects of quality of life in a ‘locality’: – infrastructure, social services, etc. (for instance, Social Diagnosis in Poland)
Non-material
Individual: Persons /Households
Health, risky situation, social relations, etc. (survey research)
Aff ective, emotion/happiness;
feeling of inclusion – well-being evaluative – experienced - eudaimonic measures -survey data (e.g. Time Use Survey)
Group:
Local Community/
neighbourhood (gmina)
Local capital, social capital, cultural, political capital – survey and administrative data
‘Health of community’, community resilience, externalities, also scales of ‘sense of belonging’ (e.g., Chavis 2008)
Source: Okrasa (2014)
When considered within the context of the relationships between community and indi- vidual well-being, the data problem goes far beyond the statistical aspects of analysis.
It involves conceptually fundamental issues of the mechanism underlying the two levels - individual (or micro-) and group (or macro-) - of the relevant phenomena, a manifesta- tion of which are the measured aspects of well-being: evaluative, experienced and eudai- monic (Dolan et al., 2010; OECD 2013; Stone and Mackie 2014, Czapiński 2017).8 Subjec- tive well-being, as a cumulative result of individual eff orts, predispositions and activities, is not only aff ected by the community - by its level of development or community well-being - but aff ects the overall quality of living environment as well. Therefore, the cross-level interaction can also be interpreted in a causal sense: some individual qualities
8 Dolan Layard, Metcalfe (2010): “The measurement of wellbeing is central to public policy for three main reasons: 1) monitoring progress; 2) informing policy design; and 3) policy appraisal”. (p.1)
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or household attributes (e.g. level of income) can aff ect some qualities of the local com- munity (e.g. level of local deprivation) which acts next as a ‘causal modifi er’ infl uencing the fi nal measure, the end-product of the process. Two alternative paths of such ‘causa- tion’ deserve research interest: “individual/household income-->local development/dep- rivation-->subjective well-being” vs. “local development-->individual income-->subjec- tive well-being”. Although there is no room to test these hypotheses here (see Okrasa 2017) the diagram below (Fig. 1) presents the core elements of the above issue.
Figure 1. Model of Cross-level (micro-, macro-) Relationships in Local Community / Neighbour- hood – behavioural interpretation
Local level/locality
/macro-
Social behaviour
Choices and actions /individual
behaviour
‘Actors’/agents and resources & perception, meaning and interpersonal
relations Local Community
/neighborhood Structural and cultural
characteristics
Individual level /micro- (generating
actions)
Emerging transformative
mechanism Context
/situational mechanism
Sorce: Eboration based on Coleman’s-Boudon’s boat (e.g., Sato 2004)
Several theories support the view that community well-being acts as an important fac- tor of individual well-being - for instance, the so-called spillover theory (Bernini et al., 2013) stresses that the environment features in which individuals live are one of the main domains aff ecting overall subjective well-being; others are the individual personal life and people’s activities. Sociologists also show a growing interest in the role played by space and place/neighbourhood in the analysis of diff erent aspects (domains) of peo- ple’s well-being – as noted by Sampson (2003): “We need to treat community contexts as important units of analysis in their own right, which in turn calls for new measurement strategies as well as theoretical frameworks that do not simply treat the neighbourhood
as a “trait” of the individual.” (p. 53). Several specifi c implications of such conceptualiza- tions (hypotheses) will be empirically checked below following brief presentation of the measures employed.
Multidimensional Index of Local Deprivation (MILD) was a key objective measure used for characterizing local community in Poland in the studies referred to here. It can be interpreted as either a measure of the level of local community (under) development and local deprivation (of gmina) or as a measure of community objective well-being - in addition to some possible ‘subjective community wellbeing’ indices, which have been recently proposed in the literature (e.g., Coram Voice, 2015; Pretty et al., 2006.), and will be illustrated below as well. It is built specifi cally for units of NUTS5/LAU2 level (2478 gminas in Poland) using data from a public fi le, Local Data Bank. It is a synthetic meas- ure, composed of 11 domain-specifi c scales constructed by confi rmatory Factor Analysis (each domain was pre-defi ned in a single-factor version of the FA, Okrasa 2013b).9 The domains included: ecology, fi nance, economy, infrastructure, municipal utilities, culture, housing, social welfare, labour market, education and health; they are all in negative ver- sion: the higher the index (scale) value, the worse the community situation with respect to a given domain of deprivation and to the total level of local deprivation. The latter is allowed by the fact that its component domains jointly meet the Cronbach’s alpha crite- rion (exceeding 0.75). The MILD also has high external validity (e.g. r-Pearson correlation with the so-called G-index released few months ago by the Ministry of Finance is 0.58). It is strongly place-dependent decreasing sharply along moving from rural to urban areas, and along the growing size of towns. Fig. 2 presents values of the component domains for the country and Subcarpathian province showing that (i) the level of deprivation in several domains - especially in health, education, infrastructure and social welfare - is very similar to the country’s average; (ii) it is worse (local deprivation is higher) in municipal services, economy and labour market; and (iii) in culture it is considerably better and in housing slightly better than an average in the country; ecology domain was excluded from the fi gure due to its negligible score compared to others.
Index of Local Under-development (ILUd) that was used for characterizing Ukrainian dis- tricts (in Lviv oblast) is also a composite measure which was derived from Local Database through FA (in similar one-factor confi rmatory version). There are fi ve items included in
9 The selection procedure consisted of: selection of domains – selection of indicators within each of the areas on the basis of factor analysis (principal component analysis) – standardization in the indicators – aggregation in the index for a given area – normalization of indicators for each domain (max = 100) – composite aggregation in the global index (Okrasa 2013; Okrasa and Gudaszewski 2013).
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it: earning (average) - labour market (employment) - social services - pensions (average) - construction industry. [NB its structure resemblances the Canadian Community Well-be- ing Index, which involves the following items: income, education, housing conditions and labour force activity.]
Figure 2. Local Deprivation in Poland and in Subcarpathian province by the Domains of the Multidimensional Index of Local Deprivation 2014
Measures of Subjective Well-being are meant to cover the main aspects of well-being and are based on the scales developed originally within the Survey Modules for the Oxford Quality of Life Index and Dashboard (OXQOL) - see Anand et al. (2010) - and adjusted to lo- cal conditions (Okrasa 2013). In order to talk also about subjective well-being of the local community, a scale based on ‘sense of community’ and ‘feeling of belonging’ was added (based on the one developed by Chavis et., 2008).
• Overall Subjective Well-being: satisfaction from life, happy/unhappy yesterday, sense of life activities.
• Satisfaction from diff erent aspects of life: health, job, sleep, leisure time, family life, social life, housing conditions, personal income, life prospect.
• Social and Intellectual Dimensions of Life: feeling of freedom and safety, religious and political beliefs, trust in people, feeling of safety, abilities to manage own life.
• Satisfaction from everyday life activities: work, transportation to work, housework, education, caring children, volunteering, eating, social meeting, hobby.
• Feeling of belonging / ‘Sense of Community’ / Subjective Community Well- being: similarity of values and needs and priorities, good feeling of being part of and wants to be in future, known to other members of community, having infl u- ence, place to live)
Distribution and inequality of the subjective well-being measures in diff erent types of residential areas provide important information about their residents’ composition in terms of well-being. Therefore, before testing the infl uence of the community devel- opment/deprivation on these measures and the role of space in this context it seemed of interest to get insight into their distribution in border residential areas - Subcarpathi- an and Lviv regions - as compared to ‘intra’ country region, e.g., Mazovian province. Are there any signifi cant similarities or diff erences specifi c to the life satisfaction of people residing in border neighbourhood, and/or between them and residents of the centre of the country? However, given that self-reported (on Likert-format questions) information constitute qualitative rather than quantitative type of scales, the appropriate methodolo- gy of checking inequality should be measured especially suited to this kind of data. Such as proposed by Allison and Foster (2004) to measuring inequality for ordinal well-being data, due to considering inequality as ‘the spread away from the median category’ (see also Dutta & Foster, 2012). The idea is based on S-dominance: distribution X has a greater population share in the category below the median and a greater population share in the category above the median, compared with Y, therefore, X has a greater spread away from the median compared with Y (the “spread” of the distribution is lower for Y).
The mean happiness of distribution X below the median can be expressed as:
= 2 ( Σ _
(c)
k – 1i + 1c ( F F )+
c (0,5– )
LX i
x i – 1
X k
i
F
k – 1X)
μ
And the mean happiness of distribution X above the median as:
= 2 ( Σ _
(c)
ni=k+1c ( F F )+
c ( – 0,5 )
XU i
x i – 1
X k
i
F
Xk)
μ
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Consequently, a well-being (happiness) inequality measure is a function I and the measure of inequality is a measure of “spread” of the distribution (based on the concept of S- dom- inance), as follows:
= μ (c) (c) ( c )
UX– μ
LXXAF
I
The measure takes values from zero to cn – c1 10.
A comparison of patterns of inequality of various measures of subjective well-being for residents of each of the studied regions is not only of interest in itself, but it may interfere with some spatial eff ects as a tendency of clustering in a certain domain more than in oth- ers. At a glance, the emerging patterns of well-being inequality in Lviv and Subcarpathian regions, and also in Mazovian, are basically similar. A relatively biggest diff erentiation oc- curs in ‘evaluation of work and living’ while the diff erences are smallest in ‘overall subjec- tive well-being’, followed by ‘satisfaction from everyday life activities’. There are, however, noticeable diff erences between respondents living in transborder areas (within 50 km from border) and in outside of this neighbourhood, in several well-being domains in Lviv region. For instance, inequality of feeling of belonging to local community is much higher among residents of the latter than of the transborder area, followed by satisfaction from important aspects of life and by overall subjective well-being. Practically, the opposite is true about the same residents and domains in the case of Subcarpathian region, where, in general, residents of transborder neighbourhood areas are somewhat more diff eren- tiated (in the same domains of well-being). Finally, when putting together all the three regions (panel C on Fig. 3), the emerging pattern of well-being inequality seems to diff er mostly between residents of Lviv regions, on the one side, and the residents of either Subcarpathian or Mazovian regions (except for ‘satisfaction from everyday life activities’, omitted in the subsequent analysis).
Having recognized some basic trends in patterning of the subjective wellbeing inequality among residents of the regions under study – with an indication in conclusion on gener- ally more diff erentiated transborder areas in Subcarpathian vs. more diff erentiated out- side (inner country) areas in Lviv region - the spatial eff ects for these measures of the local community wellbeing/deprivation can be previewed with LISA (Local Indicators of Spa- tial Association (Anselin et al., 2010). The LISA analysis is aimed at answering the above question in a direct way within a bivariate approach, before including other factors, from the individual/household level, as suggested also by the diagram in Fig. 1.
10 It is possible to convert its values to the interval 0 – 1 (restricted to scales of the same types): IXW:
=
cIXAF [0,1]n–c1
(Dutta and Foster, op cit.).