The press release was prepared by Anton Hrushetskyi, the Deputy Director of the KIIS

From September 7 to 13, 2022, the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) conducted its own all-Ukrainian public opinion survey "Omnibus". By the method of computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI) based on a random sample of mobile phone numbers (with random generation of phone numbers and subsequent statistical weighting), 1,025 respondents living in all regions of Ukraine (except the Autonomous Republic of Crimea) were interviewed. The survey was conducted with adult (aged 18 and older) citizens of Ukraine who, at the time of the survey, lived on the territory of Ukraine (within the boundaries controlled by the authorities of Ukraine until February 24, 2022). The sample did not include residents of territories that were not temporarily controlled by the authorities of Ukraine until February 24, 2022 (AR of Crimea, the city of Sevastopol, certain districts of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts), and the survey was not conducted with citizens who left the country after February 24, 2022.

Formally, under normal circumstances, the statistical error of such a sample (with a probability of 0.95 and taking into account the design effect of 1.1) did not exceed 3.4% for indicators close to 50%, 3.0% for indicators close to 25%, 2.1% - for indicators close to 10%, 1.5% - for indicators close to 5%

nder conditions of war, in addition to the specified formal error, a certain systematic deviation is added. In particular, if back in May, among all the respondents we interviewed, 2.5-4% lived in the territories occupied after February 24 (and this corresponded to the percentage of those who live there, because the generation of telephone numbers was random), now, due to the occupiers turning off the telephone connection, we managed to interview fewer respondents living in the occupied settlements, in particular, their number is 0.3%. It is important to note that although the views of the respondents who lived in the occupation were somewhat different, the general tendencies were quite similar. That is, the impossibility of interviewing such respondents does not significantly affect the quality of the results. There are other factors that can affect the quality of results in "wartime" conditions (see Annex 2).

In general, we believe that the obtained results are still highly representative and allow a fairly reliable analysis of public moods of the population.

KIIS has been asking Ukrainians the question "Do you consider yourself a happy person?" for more than 20 years. We last asked it in December 2021, 2 months before a full-scale Russian invasion. Then, in December 2021, 71% of Ukrainians considered themselves happy, and 15%, on the contrary, did not consider themselves to be so.

Now, despite more than half a year of full-scale war, the indicators have practically not changed. As of September 2022, 68% of Ukrainians considered themselves happy, did not consider themselves happy – 13%.

Graph 1. Do you consider yourself a happy person?

In Table 1, data are given in dynamics for individual socio-demographic categories of the population. As before, the tendency that younger and wealthier respondents are happier remains. Also, now we see that the share of those who are happy decreases from the West to the East (although even among respondents who lived in the East until February 24, 2022, the majority consider themselves happy).

Compared to December 2021, although there is mainly a decrease in the share of happy people, in absolute terms the decrease is mostly insignificant. The most noticeable is the decrease in the share of happy respondents in the East from 69% to 59%.

Table 1. Do you consider yourself a happy person?

A. Hrushetskyi, comments on the survey results:

You might think that asking people how happy they are at this time, when the war is going on, is irrelevant. However, in our opinion, self-assessment of happiness is one of the important social indicators of the well-being of the population and an indirect indicator of "strength" against the background of the difficult war period. Previously, our surveys showed restrained and optimistic assessments of the current situation in the country, an optimistic view of the future of Ukraine, as well as reluctance to emigrate from Ukraine.

The measure of happiness is more personal for people. It is fundamentally important that the indicator practically did not change both in general and among individual categories of the population. Even among IDPs, we see that most consider themselves happy. This is another evidence of the unity and strength of Ukrainians in repelling the enemy.

V. Paniotto, comments on the survey results:

The results of our research seem unexpected. How can people be happy when there is a terrible war? There are several considerations in this regard.

Firstly, the mechanism of happiness formation is not simple and linear. For example, an increase in wealth does not always lead to an increase in the level of happiness. In the USA, from 1985 to 2005, the real income of the population doubled, and the level of happiness did not change. The fact is that the level of happiness can be conventionally represented as a fraction, the numerator of which is the level of achievements in a broad sense (the level of material well-being, creative work, a loved one, etc.), and the denominator is the level of encroachments (for example, what level of material well-being a person considers sufficient).  The level of encroachments itself is formed depending on the level of achievements of the respondent's reference group. As the American happiness researcher R. Layard wrote, people do not become happier when their entire society becomes richer, people become happier when they become richer than their neighbors. In war, when millions of people suffer, the level of encroachment (the denominator of the happiness formula) goes down significantly, and this compensates for the hardships that people experience. It is clear that those in the war zone become unhappy, but they are only a few percent.

Secondly, the level of happiness is influenced by many factors, for example, the behavior of children, intimate relationships, relationships with friends, etc. And although the material conditions of life have deteriorated significantly and many people suffer from separation from their families, there are factors that increase the level of happiness. The cohesion of our society has significantly increased, regional differences have decreased, the value of the state for the population of Ukraine has increased, mutual support has increased, and the social and psychological climate has improved. All this increases the level of happiness of Ukrainians.

Annex 1. Formulation of questions from the questionnaire

Do you consider yourself a happy person? (% among all respondents)

Annex 2. Methodological comments on the representativeness of telephone surveys conducted during the war

Even before the full-scale Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, there were a number of factors that negatively affected the representativeness of the polls (for example, the absence of a census for more than 20 years). A full-scale war, of course, greatly affects representativeness and complicates the work of sociologists, but does not make it impossible. Access to reliable data on the state of public moods remains relevant both for Ukrainians themselves and for our foreign partners (who, as the events of recent months have shown, often underestimated and did not understand Ukraine and Ukrainians).

At the same time, in order to maintain objectivity, it is necessary to understand what limitations the war imposes on the conduct of sociological surveys. First of all, we pay attention to large-scale population movements. In September, the UN report mentioned 7.4 million Ukrainian refugees. Obviously, due to various reasons, it is difficult to consider these data to be unequivocally accurate, but in general, the rather significant scale of departure from the country is clear. There is no exact data on how many of them are adult citizens, but, most likely, it is about half. Among about 30 million adult citizens (estimated at the time of the full-scale invasion), it can be roughly estimated that about 13-15% have left the country, and it is impossible to reliably survey these citizens using telephone interviews. Even more citizens have become internally displaced persons, but they have a much smaller impact on the quality of telephone surveys, since almost all of these citizens have mobile phones and are reachable to participate in the survey (in fact, 16% of the respondents of this survey are IDPs).

Another important problem is the accessibility for the survey of the population of the territories that were occupied after February 24, 2022, due to the conduct of intensive military operations or due to interruptions in telephone connection. Now there is practically no connection. In May, 2.5-4% of respondents lived in these territories, now in the sample of residents of these territories - 0.3%. According to our current estimates, the territory occupied by Russia as of the beginning of September (occupied after February 24, 2022) accounted for about 9% of the total adult population. Taking into account the mass exodus of the population from these territories (most likely, we are talking about at least half of the population), we estimate that no more than 3-5% of the total adult population of Ukraine were inaccessible due to connection problems. Successful actions and the liberation of a number of territories in the Kharkiv region further reduce this percentage.

In our opinion, a more significant impact on representativeness can be either a generally lower willingness of citizens with "pro-Russian" attitudes to participate in surveys, or the insincerity of those who did take part in the survey (taking into account the obvious facts and prevailing opinions in the media regarding the Russian invasion , some citizens will not want to say what they really think "in public"). If to talk about the general willingness of respondents to participate in the survey, then in recent surveys we see either the same indicators or somewhat lower (although it should be borne in mind that the lower willingness to participate of "pro-Russian" citizens can be compensated by the higher willingness to participate of "pro-Ukrainian"-minded citizens).

We conducted a methodical experiment in May, which shows that the citizens who are currently participating in the surveys in terms of demographic characteristics and substantive attitudes are close to those who participated in the surveys until February 24, 2022. Preliminarily, we see some shift in the direction of "pro-Ukrainian"-minded citizens, which is reflected in up to 4-6% deviations for individual questions (in the direction of more frequent selection of answers that correspond to the "pro-Ukrainian" interpretation of events). In our opinion, in the current conditions, this is a rather optimistic indicator. However, this experiment does not give an answer as to how sincere the respondents are now in their answers.