People who live in small towns and rural areas are happier than everyone else, researchers say
People who live in small towns and rural areas are
happier than everyone else, researchers say
By Christopher Ingraham, The Washington Post Published
12:11 pm, Thursday, May 17, 2018
Heaven is wide open spaces - at least, it is for most
people, according to a massive new data set of happiness in Canada.
A team of happiness researchers at the Vancouver School
of Economics and McGill University recently published a working paper on the
geography of well-being in Canada. They compiled 400,000 responses to a pair of
national Canadian surveys, allowing them to parse out distinctions in
well-being at the level of more than 1,200 communities representing the
country's entire geography.
They were able to cross-reference the well-being
responses with other survey data, as well as figures from the Canadian census, to
see what sorts of characteristics were associated with happiness at the
community level: Are happier communities richer, for instance? Are the people
there more educated? Do they spend more time in church?
Their chief finding is a striking association between
population density - the concentration of people in a given area - and
happiness. When the researchers ranked all 1,215 communities by average
happiness, they found that average population density in the 20 percent most
miserable communities was more than eight times greater than in the happiest 20
percent of communities.
"Life is significantly less happy in urban
areas," the paper concluded.
In the region around the city of Toronto, densely
populated areas like Toronto, Hamilton and Kitchener stand out as islands of
relative unhappiness in a sea of satisfaction in the hinterlands.
The happiness measure is derived from a survey question
that asks responses to rate "how satisfied" they are with their
lives, on a scale from 1 to 10. Across Canada, community-level average
responses to this question range from 7.04 to 8.94. This may not seem like a
wide range of difference, but Canadians rarely offer self-assessments outside
this range; in a typical year just five percent of Canadians rate their satisfaction
below a 5, for instance.
It's useful to think of this narrow spectrum of responses
as representing the entire continuum of Canadian happiness. Hence, the study's
authors note that even small differences in the absolute score are highly
statistically significant.
So what makes the happiest communities different from all
the rest? Aside from fewer people, the authors found that the happiest
communities had shorter commute times and less expensive housing, and that a
smaller share of the population was foreign-born. They also found that people
in the happiest communities are less transient than in the least happy
communities, that they are more likely to attend church and that they are
significantly more likely to feel a "sense of belonging" in their communities.
It may seem contradictory that greater happiness is
correlated with both lower population density (implying fewer interpersonal
interactions) and a greater sense of "belonging" in one's community
(implying stronger social connections). But a significant body of research
shows that having a strong social network is key to well-being. Some studies
indicate that small towns and rural areas are more conducive than cities to forming
strong social bonds, which would explain some of the greater sense of belonging
observed in the happiest Canadian communities.
Perhaps even more surprising are the factors that don't
appear to play a major role in community-level differences in happiness:
average income levels and rates of unemployment and education. People may move
to cities for good-paying jobs, but the Canadian study strongly suggests it's
not making them any happier.
These findings comport with similar studies done in the
United States, which have revealed a "rural-urban happiness
gradient:" The farther away from cities people live, the happier they tend
to be.
One important caveat in the Canadian study is that the
authors aren't making any strong statements about causality: There's a clear
association between low population density and reported happiness, but that
doesn't mean that low population density causes happiness. A miserable city
dweller who moves to the country might simply become a miserable country
dweller, in other words.
However, it's clear that there's something about small
towns and rural life that's associated with greater levels of self-reported
happiness among people who live in those places. The strength of the Canadian
study is that it parses out these distinctions at an uncommonly fine level of
geographic detail.
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