A Measurement of Social Cohesion in Poland’s NUTS2 Regions in the Period 2010–2019 by Applying Dynamic Relative Taxonomy to Interval-Valued Data

Abstract

Composite indicators play an important role in the analysis of socio-economic phenomena. A number of different approaches to constructing composite indicators have been proposed in the literature. Depending on the degree of compensation, they can be divided into compensatory, partially compensatory, and non-compensatory. The following article focuses on the method of relative taxonomy and its dynamic modification. While this method is typically applied to metric data, the authors propose using the dynamic approach for interval-valued data, which describes objects of interest more precisely. Metric data are of an atomic nature; i.e., an observation of each variable is expressed as one real number. In contrast, each observation of an interval-valued variable is expressed as an interval. By making use of interval-valued data, it is possible to assess objects not only at the regional level but also at a lower level of territorial aggregation, taking into account spatial variation across districts that make up each region. The study described in the article was conducted by applying relative taxonomy in its dynamic approach to interval-valued data in order to measure the level of social cohesion in Poland’s NUTS2 regions during the period 2010–2019. The target dataset was obtained by aggregating numeric data about social cohesion in districts (LAU1) at the level of regions. The lower and upper limit of the interval for each region was based on district-level data and corresponded to the 2nd and 8th decile, respectively (60% of observations), which helped to mitigate the effect of outliers. By applying dynamic relative taxonomy to interval-valued data, it was possible to graphically represent changes in the level of social cohesion that took place across 17 Poland’s NUTS2 regions between 2010 and 2019. It was found that during the reference period, the level of social cohesion in the regions systematically improved. Despite the observed variation, the distance between the regions consistently decreased over time. The level of social cohesion was found to be higher in regions that had received more EU funding to support regional development.