Urban and Rural Women’ Health Attitudes: The Example of the Nizhny Novgorod Region

Introduction: Attitude towards health plays the key role in maintaining and strengthening women’s health, the most important element of which is the value-based motivational component. At the same time, it is critical to understand the specifics of forming health attitude in the urban and rural settings.

Objective: To identify features of the value-based component of health attitude in women living in areas with different levels of urbanization.

Materials and methods: The empirical basis of the study conducted in spring 2025 was the data of a formalized survey of 1,637 residents of the Nizhny Novgorod Region aged 18 years and older. The sample was created by river sampling allowing verification of the territorial affiliation of the respondents. The data were analyzed using the IBM SPSS Statisticssoftware.

Results: We established differences in health attitude between women living in the regional center and rural areas.

Urban residents perceived health as an instrumental value to a greater extent than women living in villages (77 % versus 69 %). Comparison of the means showed that rural women demonstrated higher internal motivation to maintain health (χ2 = 8.343 at p < 0.05) along with lower confidence in their own ability to manage it (Z = –2.485 at p < 0.05). The influence of socio-demographic factors, such as employment and the levels of income and education on the women’s value-based attitude towards health strongly depended on the place of residence. In the urban setting, employment status increased the importance of health as a resource for working capacity (ρ = –0.118 at p < 0.05), while in the villages it increased the motivation to take care of it independently (γ = –0.333 at p < 0.05).

Conclusions: Rural women perceive health as a terminal value and exhibit a proactive attitude towards it. Female city dwellers consider health to be an instrumental value, thus exhibiting a reactive attitude, which is related to externalization of responsibility and the fast pace of urban life.

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