Do Health Self-Evaluations in Urban and Rural Areas in Latvia Differ?

Abstract

Health self-evaluations are aspects analysed by researchers world-wide as from self-evaluation depend many aspects of person’s feelings, satisfaction with life and motivation for active life. Researchers have identified that often health self-evaluation is better than reality and the person achieves many goals in their life even with not so good health, and there are many cases when the health self-evaluation is good, but reality is much worse. Comparative data analysis on health self-evaluations in EU countries, EEA countries and EU candidate countries are carried out in EU-SILC. The aim of this article is to investigate – do health self-evaluations differ statistically significant by inhabitants of Latvia in urban areas and in rural areas. Research methods applied: scientific publications analysis, analysis of data obtained in EU-SILC survey using different statistical indicators: indicators of descriptive statistics, cross-tabulations, statistical hypotheses test with t-test on equalities of arithmetic means. Results indicate that although the health self-assessment by inhabitants are higher in rural areas in Latvia in comparison with urban health self-assessment by inhabitants, the difference on averages of those evaluations is not statistically different with significance level 0.001.