Theoretical and methodological problems of measuring social comfort: results of empirical analysis based on Russian data

The research is aimed at developing theoretical aspects of the latent category “social comfort”, searching for new assessment methods and opportunities for using various types of information resources (big data, continuous and sample population surveys, state and administrative statistics). Development of the axiomatics of a new category and its modeling are necessary to determine a real level of population's well-being in dynamics, to assess true quality of people's life. The purpose of the research is aimed at development of theoretical and methodological foundations of social comfort as a latent category in the discourse of social processes and the test of its assessment using the method of generalized principal components. The main results of the study include the clarification of connotations and development of axiomatics for the new category “social comfort”; systematization of relevant international surveys, and the formation of reliable categories that ensure the validity of the results; assessment of the level of social comfort using the method of generalized principal components for a space-time sample - the STATIS method. The peculiarity of the method, used for space-time sampling, is an opportunity to simultaneously study object-feature matrices, related to different time points, and the identification of the parameters that mostly determine the scattering of observation objects: in our case, the regions of the Russian Federation, on a plane of main components of the generalized (compromise) space. The scientific novelty of the research is development of the axiomatics of the new category “social comfort”, which allows measuring and studying a person from the point of view of his inclusion in society, semantic correlation of various types of activity with time and external situation, expanding the subjective aspect of measuring the quality of life as one of the most important categories of social and economic science; the formation of new approaches to modeling and evaluating social comfort. The study is of practical interest to researchers, and its results may be used for creating socio-economic development programs in Russian regions.