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Is the Easy Life Always the Happiest? Examining the Association of Convenience and Well-Being in Taiwan

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Abstract

Social scientists have under-examined neighborhood stores and other “resources” and their relationships to community welfare and personal happiness. Because the presence of neighborhood conveniences may signify that a neighborhood caters to residents’ needs and smoothes out the hassles of their daily lives, it could be hypothesized that commercial amenities and services enhance individuals’ satisfaction with their neighborhoods, with their health, and even with their lives as a whole. This study used a national probability sample from Taiwan, a densely populated society in East Asia, to test if service-oriented commercial and religious enterprises in neighborhoods are associated with positive estimations of well-being by those who occupy these spaces. We empirically examine whether proximity to main roads, night markets and temples or proximity to smoky food stands and other shops that produce pungent products affects well-being. Our findings from multivariate analyses suggest that if nearby conveniences are conceived as annoyances, they tend to lower satisfaction with neighborhood, but they do not lower life satisfaction in general. In contrast, air quality, along with “peace and quietness” is reported by respondents to be key in enhancing general well-being. We discuss the policy implications in the concluding session.

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Notes

  1. As we conducted quite a number of statistical tests on Table 2, some statisticians suggest that adjustment of α down to a lower level than conventional 5 % or 1 % might be necessary to avoid an inflated Type I error (Aickin and Gensler 1996). However, an adjustment such as the Bonferroni correction is not a necessity herein. This is so not because it tend to incur conservative statistical tests, but because our research design is not the repeated tests of the same hypothesis over many subsamples (e.g., sex, age or income groups), in which such adjustments are most suitable. In a research design that aims to assess distinctive predictors’ effects on different dependent variables, like ours, a p level too strict can be deleterious to sound statistical inference (Perneger 1998).

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Professor Po-Keung Ip and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments for the earlier versions of this article. Any errors remain our responsibility.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social and Policy Sciences, Yuan Ze University, Jungli City, Taoyuan County, Taiwan

    Chun-Hao Li

  2. Department of Sociology, National Taipei University, New Taipei City, Taiwan

    Ming-Chang Tsai

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  1. Chun-Hao Li
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  2. Ming-Chang Tsai
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Correspondence to Ming-Chang Tsai.

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Li, CH., Tsai, MC. Is the Easy Life Always the Happiest? Examining the Association of Convenience and Well-Being in Taiwan. Soc Indic Res 117, 673–688 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-013-0392-x

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