Szubjektív indikátorok szétváló európai mintái – fókuszban a szóródással és a regionális eltérésekkel válság előtt és után

Abstract

ABSTRACT Building on a decade-long series of comparative data of the European Social Survey, our study has targeted an array of substantive and methodological questions. Selecting a set of subjective indicators from the domain of satisfaction, their regional and temporal profiles were analyzed in detail. Special attention was paid to the comparison of larger European regions preceding and following the crisis phenomena in the wake of the financial breakdown of Fall 2008. It has been confirmed that a wider spectrum of structural parameters, with dispersion measures and relative enthropy among them, may yield a more diverse picture of social attitudes than average scores, in more common usage, alone. Analyses by means of a partially novel six-element typology of European regions have allowed for a well-defined outline of the tendencies in question. Even differences between the old member-states of the European Union have become more significant during the crisis period, with the Mediterranian region, in particular, getting farther from the Scandinavian and Continental patterns and approaching those of the new member states and Eastern European regions. The level of satisfaction highly correlates with that of economic development, and the same applies, with an opposite sign, to variation and tightness of opinions, while these relationships have even intensified during recession. Factors in the background of regional profiles have been searched in more detail by a case-study-like approach focusing on three distinct countries displaying characteristic instances of a typology of polarization in public attitudes based on consensus/deviation and tightness of facets of opinion as dimensions. Keywords: subjective indicators, dispersion, regional typology, crisis, polarization