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Relative Importance of Individual and Community Predictors of Wellbeing

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Abstract

Inspired by theory in wellbeing science, we examined the relative importance of lifestyle factors and living conditions when predicting two dimensions of wellbeing (hedonic and eudaimonic) in a representative sample of 12,826 participants from Nova Scotia collected in 2019. Using multiple regression and measures of relative importance based on the Lindeman, Merenda and Gold (lmg) method, we identified which variables are most important to predicting life satisfaction and life worth. Twenty-two predictors accounted for 51% of the variance in life satisfaction, of which six accounted for 40% of the variance: self-rated mental health (11%), time adequacy (8%), satisfaction with natural environment (7%), sense of community (5%), financial insecurity (5%), and self-rated physical health (3%). These variables were also the top predictors of life worthwhileness, although all 22 predictors (R2 = 0.42) and these six predictors (R2 = 0.26) accounted for less variance than for life satisfaction. These results show that both community-level (i.e., environmental quality of neighbourhood, sense of community) and individual-level (i.e., mental health, time adequacy, financial insecurity, and physical health) factors are substantial predictors of wellbeing. The effect sizes differ between the hedonistic and eudaimonic dimensions of wellbeing, suggesting there may be important predictors of eudaimonic wellbeing not accounted for. This study may inform where community-level programming and policy could focus resources more effectively to promote wellbeing for individuals and their communities.

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Notes

  1. Early drafts of our analyses also incorporated region as a random effect. However, region-level variance was incredibly small for life satisfaction and life worthwhileness, respectively (ICCs < 0.005). That is, region predicted virtually none of the variation in our outcomes. Thus, for model parsimony and to allow for a more straightforward calculation of effect sizes, we omitted region from the final models presented.

  2. An arbitrary upper limit of 100 was imposed on the three items measuring number of relatives, friends, and neighbours, as values higher than this are both implausible and extreme multivariate outliers. In each instance, less than 0.5% of the sample reported more than 100 persons.

  3. When age2 was removed from the model, the linear coefficients for age when predicting life satisfaction were B = 0.00, β = − 0.03, 95% CI for β [-0.05, − 0.01] and the linear coefficients when predicting life worth were B = -0.01, β = − 0.04, 95% CI for β [-0.06, − 0.02] No other slopes changed in any substantial way.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada

    Taylor G. Hill & Sean P. Mackinnon

  2. Healthy Populations Institute, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada

    Taylor G. Hill

  3. Canadian Index of Wellbeing, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

    Bryan Smale

  4. Department of Leisure and Recreation, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

    Bryan Smale

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  1. Taylor G. Hill
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Hill, T.G., Mackinnon, S.P. & Smale, B. Relative Importance of Individual and Community Predictors of Wellbeing. Int. Journal of Com. WB 6, 279–299 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42413-023-00196-8

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