If you have to organize your life priorities and values in order of their importance, which will take the top spot? Chances are that it will be your family, especially if you are living in the Middle East. According to the latest World Values Survey, people in the MENA region put family first.
Well, that is actually the case in almost all of the countries which were included in the survey. The only two exceptions were Lebanon and Germany. They were discovered to value their family almost as much as they did their friends.
World Values Survey is released every four years and its goal is to capture global and regional opinions and attitudes on various subjects, issues and general life values and matters. It covers almost everything you can think of, including attitudes on employment, education, healthcare, lifestyle, economy and politics.
As it was already mentioned, the report also studies people’s values and priorities in life. In the Middle East, it is the family that takes the crown. Religion comes second in most of the countries in the region, but its importance is almost equally big. About 50% of respondents living in the Middle East have shared that they value their friends as one very important part of their life. However, works often comes before them, since an average of 75% have said that their job is what matters the most. Interestingly, in the Middle East, politics and leisure time are not that significant for people. Only 30% of the participants in the survey from the region have referred to these two things as being very important.
The study also examined whether people worldwide were happy or not. What it found was that compared to the previous edition of the report, people have become happier. The level of global happiness is reported to have jumped from a little over 70% to nearly 85%.
However, this percentage is lower in the Middle East. Very few were the people stated that they were very happy. Still, more than 50% of the region’s population shared that they were “rather happy.” In addition, Egypt is one of the few countries in which people actually feel less happy compared to a few years ago. There, happiness rates have plummeted by 65%.
Another thing on which the research focused was people’s greatest and most common worries. In the Middle East, most adults worry that they will not be able to provide their kids with a good education (45%-50%). Other things that trouble people in the region include job loss or inability to find a new job. Terrorist attacks and civil wars are also a common threat of which many countries in the Middle East are afraid. Still, these fears are strong only in the countries that lack political stability.
The conclusion of the report is that happiness is not closely connected to factors like income, healthcare or even civil rights. That was due to the fact that many third-world countries which lacked across all three of these categories, had one of the world’s highest happiness scores.
