Connection and well-being

This part turns from deaths to what people report about their lives. It asks how connected people are to one another, how they rate their lives and how they describe their days, and how each of these varies with place. The chapters use counties, ZIP Code Tabulation Areas and individual survey respondents as their units, and a pattern in one unit is not treated as a finding about another.

Chapter 7.1, Civic life, loneliness and partnership compares counties on civic participation, measured by voter turnout and by the share of households that answered the census on their own. Both fall across levels of county deprivation, and neither keeps a link to upward mobility once county income, racial composition and poverty are held fixed. The chapter then moves to people. Gallup respondents who are married or in a domestic partnership rate their lives higher than other adults, and the difference is no smaller in counties with more social capital. A last section compares modeled loneliness across ZIP Code Tabulation Areas with who lives in them, and the model already uses age, so part of the pattern with marriage is built in. The county measures come from several different years and the Gallup interviews are unweighted. Selection into partnership is the main limit on the comparison between partnered and other adults.

Chapter 7.2, Life evaluation and daily feelings separates two kinds of question about a life, how a person rates it on a ladder and how the previous day felt. It compares each by county deprivation and by the respondent's own income, and it asks which daily feeling tracks county deaths of despair. The county pattern in the ladder partly reflects who lives where, and the chapter says how it changes when respondents of the same age, sex, race, education and household income are compared. The survey has no weights, and its respondents are interviewed once, so the chapter compares people and does not follow anyone over time.

Chapter 7.3, Mental distress in young adults uses a different survey, with weights, to follow frequent mental distress among adults by age group from 2014 and to compare it by sex, income and education. The survey draws a new sample each year, so the youngest adults in one year are not the people interviewed in an earlier year at a younger age. It records the state of residence and nothing finer, and it describes respondents and not neighborhoods.