The value of home comfort in the structure of values of individual life activity

Abstract

The article provides an interpretation of the value of home comfort and explores its place in the structure of factors of a person’s life, including other personal values. A conceptualisation of the individual value of home comfort is suggested based on psychological and sociological ways of understanding it. The article’s empirical part is based on the results of two online surveys. The first was conducted in March 2020 among students of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (N = 417), and the second – among residents of the Kyiv region in June and July of 2021 (N = 728). The sociological test “Individual values and interests – 13” was used as a key technique for measuring individual values. The value of home comfort is considered through the article’s material and emotional components, namely: good conditions at the place of residence (material component) and home comfort (responsible for the emotional component). Home comfort is impossible without emotional and psychological comfort, which is subjective and can manifest differently for each person, depending on their value system. For statistical analysis, the Condorcet method was used to identify the cumulative rating of values, the chi-square independence test to analyse relationships with external factors, and the Z-test for one sample was applied to explore relationships with other values. Based on these empirical studies, the value “home comfort” ranks 6th among residents of the Kyiv region (2021) and 8th among students (2020) in the structure of proposed individual values. Home comfort yields such values as physical health, interpersonal relationships, psychological comfort, personal freedom, and morality. It can be argued that the weak, positive relationship was fixed between the value of “home comfort” with the level of education, marital status, and the way of spending free time. Among other individual values, “home comfort” is positively related to the value of “interpersonal relations”, and a negative relationship is observed for such individual values as self-realisation, freedom, and morality.