Files
Abstract
In Great Britain the make-up of rural communities is
changing. Young individuals are moving to cities and
the population of rural communities is ageing. In this
context, it is important to sustain and enhance people’s
well-being and community cohesion. The purpose
of this paper is to show that pubs are important
facilitators of community cohesion and ultimately
well-being of residents. This is done by compiling a
database of secondary data at the parish level of rural
communities of England. From this data, measures of
community cohesion and social interaction are derived
and correlated with the number of pubs within
the parish. Pubs are found to be statistically significantly
positively associated with community cohesion
and social interaction. The paper goes on to construct
regression and path models to relate the number of
pubs and community cohesion and interaction to selfreported
health as a proxy for well-being. Significant
positive associations are again found. These findings
provide a strong case to foster the sustainability of
rural pubs. Diese Studie untersucht den Einfluss ländlicher Pubs
auf den sozialen Zusammenhalt und die Lebensqualität
in ländlichen Regionen Großbritanniens. Die Autoren
untersuchen dabei, ob ländliche Pubs einen
positiven Effekt auf den gemeinschaftlichen Verbund
und das Wohlbefinden in der Kommune ausüben. Die
von den Autoren entwickelte ökonometrische Analyse
umfasst Regressions- sowie Pfad-Modelle und nutzt
die Gesundheitswerte von Kommunenmitgliedern als
Proxy für örtliches Wohlbefinden. Die Ergebnisse
dieser Arbeit liefern starke Argumente für die Förderung
der Erhaltung ländlicher Pubs.