To Minsk (Минск) and Beyond!

Life and Job Satisfaction in Belarus, by Profession/Job Type, Education Level, and Age

Today I thought I would provide a little more detail on self-reported life and job satisfaction levels in Belarus, particularly as each relates to respondent profession/job type, education level, and age.

But first, I thought I would provide a comparison point, providing a quick look at comparative life satisfaction in Belarus and the U.S., by profession/job type (see Table 1 below), which shows that U.S. employees of all job types are reportedly much more satisfied with their life than their Belarusian counterparts.  In both countries, unskilled manual laborers have the lowest life satisfaction scores.

Table 1:

Now, let's look more at life satisfaction and job satisfaction in Belarus based on profession/job type, education level, and age.  

Table 2 below shows comparative mean life satisfaction scores for Belarus, by profession/job type of the respondent and study year (1990, 1996, and 2000).  While overall mean life satisfaction scores have dropped significantly over this 10-year period (from 5.5 in 1990 to 4.8 in 2000), Table 2 shows very significant drops from 1990 to 1996 in mean scores for employers/managers of large/small organizations.  There is also a fairly clear pattern of more professional employees experiencing higher overall life satisfaction than those who do some sort of manual/blue-collar labor.

 Table 2:

Table 3 shows comparative life satisfaction scores by Belarusian respondent education level and age.  We see that increased education level contributes to higher life satisfaction scores and that younger Belarusians tend to have higher levels of life satisfaction than their older counterparts (both findings are consistent with many other life satisfaction studies that have looked at the role of education and age). 

 Table 3:

Table 4 shows the comparative mean job satisfaction scores for Belarusian workers, by profession/job type (I actually have a more detailed table that breaks the job types out further, but it is quite large and I couldn't get a clear enough screen shot of it to be able to add a clear picture of it here).  Though there does not seem to be any clear-cut distinction between professional-level employees and those holding blue collar types of positions, the table below does show slightly higher job satisfaction levels for employees of the professional variety.  The more detailed table shows that laborers in mining, construction, manufacturing and transport (mean of 4.4) share the distinction of experiencing the lowest mean job satisfaction scores with life science and health associate professionals (mean of 4.4).  Stationary plant and related operators have the highest job satisfaction scores (7.1) and clerks (6.5) have the second highest.  

Table 4: 

Table 5 shows comparative job satisfaction scores by Belarusian worker education level and age.  We see that increased education level contributes to higher job satisfaction scores and that older employees tend to also have higher levels of job satisfaction than their younger counterparts (both findings are consistent with many other job satisfaction studies that have looked at the role of education and age).  However, for those with the least educational attainment, those workers from ages 55-65 have mean job satisfaction scores just slightly higher than those of the youngest age group, while it is the 45-54 age group for middle educational attainment employees, and the 65+ age group of the upper educational attainment employees that are most similar to the youngest age group.

Table 5:

In future posts, I will likely look at how other individual factors (such as marital status, household composition, housing situation, other occupation characteristics, economic situation, geographical location, and ethnicity) impact self-reported life satisfaction and job satisfaction in Belarus.