Jantsch, A. and Piper, A. orcid.org/0000-0002-2862-4523 (2025) A reconsideration of the relationship between town size and well-being in Latin America. Applied Research in Quality of Life. ISSN 1871-2584
Abstract
In this study, we explore the relationship between town size and subjective well-being (SWB) in Latin America. We utilize data from the Latinobarómetro survey from 2005 to 2015, employing multilevel modeling to analyze individual responses to life satisfaction as an indicator of SWB. We refine the town size categories provided in the Latinobarómetro by cross-referencing the geographic information with the United Nations Demographic Yearbook, one of our main contributions, leaving us with more refined town size categories than previous research. Given previous theories, we also explore how education moderates the town size-SWB relationship. Our findings reveal that individuals in towns with populations between 10,000 and 500,000 report lower life satisfaction compared to those in smaller or larger towns. Controlling for national macroeconomic conditions reverses the positive association between SWB and living in a very large city. Furthermore, we find some support for the notion that highly-educated individuals are more satisfied than the low-educated in large cities. This study comprehensively underscores the importance of refining town size data and suggests avenues for future research to deepen collective understanding of the ‘geography of happiness’ in Latin America.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/. |
Keywords: | Life satisfaction, Subjective well-being, Education, Town size, Latin America, Latinobarómetro, Multilevel modelling |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Business (Leeds) > Economics Division (LUBS) (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 26 Nov 2024 15:45 |
Last Modified: | 28 Jan 2025 09:28 |
Published Version: | https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11482-0... |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | Springer |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s11482-024-10408-8 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:220020 |