TITLE:
Does Education Affect Individual Well-Being? Some Italian Empirical Evidences
AUTHORS:
Francesca Giambona, Mariano Porcu, Isabella Sulis
KEYWORDS:
Well-Being, Education, Latent Class Regression Analysis, IRT, Multivariate Regression
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Statistics,
Vol.4 No.5,
August
7,
2014
ABSTRACT:
Using data from the
last European Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), this paper
focuses on the measurement of well-being and on its association with education.
EU-SILC survey gives information on several aspects of people’s daily life (i.e. housing, labour, health, education,
finance, material deprivation and possession of durables) allowing a
multi-dimensional approach to the study of well-being, poverty and social
exclusion. For our aims we have considered only survey data collected in Italy. Due to the multidimensionality of well-being
concept, we have selected some variables related principally to four main
dimensions of well-being, which are financial endowment, housing conditions and
goods possessions, health status, and environment. A first explanatory analysis
via multivariate regression model has highlighted the effect of education on
the factors considered. Finally, a latent class regression analysis has been
used to cluster individuals into mutually exclusive latent classes which
identify different intensities of well-being (the latent trait) taking into
account the effect of education in the membership probability of each latent
class.