Comparative analysis of students’ subjective well-being in vocational and tertiary educational institutions of St. Petersburg

Abstract

The article characterises subjective well-being of St. Petersburg’s student youth. In spite of the great amount of research on subjective well-being there is still no universal frame of theoretical and empirical study of this phenomenon. In this regard, researches studied subjective well-being, face three fundamental questions: what to study? how to study? and how to interpret the results? The author attempts to give the answers to these questions. The first part of the article is focused on methodological issues: firstly, we compare and evaluate various methodological approaches to the study of subjective well-being of different social groups; secondly, we propose an original method of how to measure subjective well-being based on using psychological techniques of measuring the level of a single social frustration in large-N sociological research (basically, surveys). The second part of the article presents the results of the author’s comparative research of students’ subjective well-being in vocational and tertiary educational institutions of St. Petersburg. It is based on secondary data analysis of research done in 2012 among the 4,573 students of 37 educational institutions in St. Petersburg. The article discusses similarities and differences in the a single well-being of representatives of both groups and attempts to develop a new approach to the interpretation of the results. Refs 23. Table 1.