ISQOLS Webinar, "People or places? Perceived leftbehindness and subjective wellbeing in Italy."

Wednesday, 14 October

10:00am EDT/16:00 CET

Event Information

Across Italy, political and academic debates often frame "left-behind" places in terms of territorial indicators such as depopulation, poor infrastructure, and distance from services. But what if how people feel about their position matters more than where they actually live? In this webinar, new research using original 2025 survey data will be presented to explore the relationship between perceived left-behindness and subjective well-being in Italy, distinguishing between a personal sense of being left behind and a territorial one. Using ordered logit and multilevel models, the analysis looks at how these two forms of perceived disadvantage relate to life satisfaction, happiness, motivation, depression, and loneliness. The results show that feeling personally left behind is strongly and consistently linked to worse well-being across every dimension measured, with the sharpest effects on mental health meaning that individuals who feel personally left behind report more than double the odds of depression and loneliness. Territorial left-behindness, by contrast, shows a much weaker and less stable relationship, one that largely fades once individual characteristics and subjective perceptions are taken into account. Perhaps most surprisingly, living in Italy's structurally disadvantaged "inner areas" is not, in itself, associated with lower well-being. Together, these findings suggest that in this context it is perceived relative individual position, not objective territorial disadvantage, that truly shapes how people experience their lives.