Individual well-being in Italy: Combining subjective and objective data through partial orders

In this paper we present a novel analysis pertaining to well-being in Italian regions, for year 2010, combining subjective and objective ordinal data into a consistent and unified framework. The analysis is performed through a new evaluation methodology, based on partial order theory, which produces well-being scores without involving any aggregation among attributes. This way, the ordinal nature of the data is fully respected and the main drawbacks of the classical composite indicator approach, when applied to non-numerical variables, are overcome. For sake of completeness, results obtained using this new methodology are compared with those from more traditional approaches, showing the benefits of using partial order theory in evaluation studies, in terms of both data respect and results interpretation.