Mareeva S. Subjective well-being and ill-being zones in the Russian society. RUDN Journal of Sociology, 2018, Vol.18, No. 4, pp. 695-707.

Текст статьи на сайте журнала URL: http://journals.rudn.ru/sociology/article/view/19750 (дата обращения 28.11.2018)

Abstract

The difficult economic conditions that characterized the economic sphere of the country's life for the last few years have once again actualized the problems of assessing the well-being of the population, not only objective, but also subjective. This article is devoted to defining the boundaries and revealing the characteristics of subjective well-being and ill-being in modern Russian society. On the basis of the all-Russian representative sociological survey conducted in 2018 by the Institute of Sociology of the FCTAS RAS, by cluster analysis zones of subjective well-being and subjective ill-being are identified, as well as an intermediate zone. It is shown that the zone of subjective well-being is smaller today than the zone of subjective ill-being; its representatives are characterized by high assessments of all aspects of their lives, including those not related to income and consumption, while subjective ill-being is reflected in a pronounced dissatisfaction with material situation and leisure and holiday opportunities, as well as with satisfactory assessments of other aspects of life. The zone of subjective ill-being is formed not only and even not so much by low incomes, but due to the problems that its representatives face in their daily lives and which they are not able to solve on their own. Differences in the situation of Russians from the two polar zones lead to a differentiation of their requests for social policy, which, however, is reflected mostly not in the divergence of their priorities in this respect, but in the intensity of the request. The key areas in which the entire population expects assistance from the state today is the provision of fair wages and the establishment of the health care system. The specifics of the situation of the selected groups indicates that without resolving these problems, the zone of subjective ill-fortune is unlikely to decline even in the context of rising population incomes. As far as their localization is concerned, the zone of ill-being is shifted to the rural areas, the older populations and the manual labor, while the zone of well-being is localized today in the young urban middle class.