The Creative Class and Subjective Well-being: Multilevel Analysis
A report by Irina Vartanova at the LCSR regular seminar
On May 16, 2013 Irina Vartanova (research assistant at LCSR), delivered a report on “The Creative Class and Subjective Well-being: Multilevel Analysis” at the regular seminar of LCSR .
Irina investigates whether belonging to creative class affects subjective well-being. According to Richard Florida (the author of the concept of ‘creative class’), creative class can be characterized by well-paid job, inspiring and fulfilling professional specialization and particular lifestyle which differs from lifestyles of other social classes. The previous research by Mellander et al. (2012) demonstrated that subjective well-being of creative class is higher in the rich countries and lower in the poor ones.
Irina considers that belonging to creative class is associated with freedom of choice and job satisfaction which are the factors that positively affect the level of subjective well-being. Therefore, she assumes that the members of creative class should be happier on average than members of service and manufacturing class.
In order to check this hypothesis Irina used the data from the 5th wave of the World Values Survey. Using principal component factor analysis she constructed an index to identify creative class membership. This index consists of 3 items concerning specifics of respondent`s work (routine vs. creative, intellectual vs. manual, independence vs. task execution). Level of education and income were included into the model as control variables.
Preliminary results of multilevel regression analysis seem to be peculiar. Belonging to creative class definitely affects subjective well-being in Ethiopia and Morocco; furthermore high regression coefficients are observed in Mali, Slovenia, Egypt and Germany. Switzerland, the USA and Norway are located in the middle of the graph, while the weakest association between subjective well-being and belonging to creative class appeared in India, Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia and Turkey. The speaker noticed that these results engender new questions rather than give answers to the previous ones.
The results were striking and raised a vivid discussion after the presentation. Irina received recommendations to explore the rich and the poor countries separately and also to control for the proportion of creative class in developing countries in further analysis.
by Sofia Lopatina