PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN SMALL TOWNS HAPPIER, NEW STUDY SAYS

A team of happiness researchers at the Vancouver School of Economics and McGill University recently published a working paper on the geography of well-being in Canada. They compiled 400,000 responses to a pair of national Canadian surveys, allowing them to parse out distinctions in well-being at the level of more than 1,200 communities representing the country’s entire geography.

Their chief finding is a striking association between population density — the concentration of people in a given area — and happiness. When the researchers ranked all 1,215 communities by average happiness, they found that average population density in the 20 percent most miserable communities was more than eight times greater than in the happiest 20 percent of communities. “Life is significantly less happy in urban areas,” the paper concluded.

In the region around the city of Toronto, densely populated areas such as Toronto, Hamilton and Kitchener stand out as islands of relative unhappiness in a sea of satisfaction in the hinterlands.

The happiness measure is derived from a survey question that asks responses to rate “how satisfied” they are with their lives, on a scale of 1 to 10.

So what makes the happiest communities different? Aside from fewer people, the authors found the happiest communities had shorter commute times and lessexpensive housing. They also found that people in the happiest communities are less transient than in the least happy communities, that they are more likely to attend church and that they are significantly more likely to feel a “sense of belonging” in their communities.

It may seem contradictory that greater happiness is correlated with both lower population density (implying fewer interpersonal interactions) and a greater sense of “belonging” in one’s community (implying stronger social connections). But a significant body of research shows that having a strong social network is key to well-being. Some studies indicate that small towns and rural areas are more conducive than cities to forming strong social bonds, which would explain some of the greater sense of belonging observed in the happiest Canadian communities.