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Chapter 2
Figure 25. The map of the world according to variables describing the level of happiness and well-being (individual responses – Dataset 5)
Note: omitted countries are indicated in grey. Source: own elaboration using R-cran (maps package, Becker et al., 2018).
2.5. Conclusion The present research attempted to assess the links between cultural environment, formal institutional environment and well-being using clustering analysis. While the majority of studies rely on the country-level analysis based on the aggregate indices, the first attempt was made to assess whether the notion of national cultural environment makes sense, i.e., whether informal institutional environment (i.e., the scope of norms and values shared by individuals) is sufficiently homogenous (i.e., whether the notion of the national cultural environment makes sense). The analysis was performed based on the individual data provided by the WVS, where the prior stage of the classification was assigning a cluster to individual respondents. The principal component analysis conducted prior to the study has demonstrated that Welzel’s autonomy and post-materialism index contributed the most to the principal component yet being weakly correlated. When examining a more extensive dataset (i.e., the dataset consisting of more than 170 variables), the variables characterized by the most significant contribution to the principal component and positively correlated with each other were acceptance of homosexuality, acceptance of divorce, acceptance of sex before marriage, and acceptance
