ASA Conference 2019 - Statistics for Health and Well-being
Conference of the Applied Statistics Association.
The Italian system of indicators on Equitable and Sustainable Well-being (Benessere Equo e Sostenibile - BES) proposed by the National Institute of Statistics represents a well-established reference database in the national and international debate on the research on alternative well- being measures. The main strengths of this set are represented by the broad coverage of all the components of this complex concept and the availability of information not only at the aggregate level but also at the provincial level (NUTS3 level) (Istat, 2019; Taralli et al. 2015). In this framework, it is possible to consider not only the levels of well-being but also the differences in their distribution thus highlighting differences in the territories.
The paper proposes an advancement of work elaborated in Davino et al. (2018), where a hierarchical model was used to study the relationships among components of the BES. The proposed hierarchical model allows us to synthesize individual indicators into single indexes, in order to construct composite indicators at a global and a partial level. Partial Least Squares path modeling (Lohmöller J.B., 1989) and a recent method, called Quantile Composite-based path modeling (Davino and Vinzi, 2016), were used respectively to estimate average effects in the network of relationships among variables and to explore whether the magnitude of these effects changes across different parts of the variables distributions. The present contribution aims to deepen the study taking into account that living conditions are quite different according to an unobserved or observed heterogeneity (for example according to the geographic area of the province).