WIT Press


ANALYSIS OF INDICATORS OF QUALITY OF LIFE DUE TO AIR POLLUTION IN SLAVONSKI BROD, CROATIA

Price

Free (open access)

Volume

230

Pages

9

Page Range

577 - 585

Published

2018

Paper DOI

10.2495/AIR180541

Copyright

WIT Press

Author(s)

IVIĆ-HOFMAN IGOR, CVITKOVIĆ ANTE

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to analyze the data of air quality in the area of Slavonski Brod and Nova Gradiška and to test the differences between the groups of respondents in 2016 and 2017. According to the “wind indicators”, the areas of exposure to polluted air were defined as “less exposed” (438 subjects), “exposed” (450) from Slavonski Brod and “non-exposed area” (286) from town Nova Gradiska. Differences in categorical indicators between groups were calculated by the hi-squared test. Research has shown statistically significant difference in the characteristics of “How healthy is your environment?” (2017) (unexposed subjects, p=0.042) and “Do you believe that polluted air harms your health?” (2017) (less exposed subjects, p=0.01), ie, a significant difference was found in additional features of air – odor/stench, soot or smoke, smog and dust (p<0.001).There were also statistically significant differences in the characteristics “assessment of quality of life” (p=0.027), “environmental health” (p<0.001) and “harmfulness of polluted air on health” (p<0.001) (“exposed” and “non-exposed” group). Due to limited size of research sample and its frequency of certain individual states and phenomena, strength of research tests in some cases may be limited due to that fact, and therefore these research results should be interpreted with some caution.

Keywords

air pollution, quality of life, “exposed”, “less exposed”, “non-exposed” group