General Well-Being and Civic Engagement. the Case of the City of Poznan

The main aim of the paper consists in the attempt to explore relationships between general well-being indicators and selected aspects of civic engagement, which comprises such dimensions as: interest in public affairs of the city, level of information when it comes to community issues, declared readiness to participate in community life, actual degree of civic participation and of civic competence. The paper is going to be based on a longitudinal project of monitoring life quality “Quality of life indicators of the citizens of Poznan” conducted by the Quality of Life Center of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan together with the Poznan City Council since 2002. In this period, 9 general measurements utilising uniform methodology were conducted as well as 3 monographic research-projects focusing on the issues of safety, civic engagement, and on social exclusion. The research program comprises twelve areas of city life, each of which is based on two sets of indicators: a. indicators derived from public statistics and b. indicators based on quantitative surveys of a representative sample of citizens. The systematic nature of the project (it has been running for 15 years), as well as its large scale – both in terms of desk research, and in the survey effort, allows for accessing large amounts of data.