Healthy Practices of the Middle Class in Poland – Research Review

Abstract

An attribute of the middle class in Western societies is a lifestyle including healthy behaviors. Since 1989, attempts have been made to identify healthy practices in the lifestyle of intelligentsia and entrepreneurs, which are the basic categories of forming the middle class in Poland. The aim was to make research review, including estimation of the frequency of healthy behaviors in these categories between 1997 and 2019 versus other segments of society possible thanks to repeatable studies by CBOS on nationwide representative samples. It showed that managers and specialists with higher education are characterized by higher percentages of people declaring healthy behaviors and lower percentages of peo¬ple declaring unhealthy ones. Entrepreneurs, especially at the beginning, had an average frequency of the examined behaviors compared to other categories. The results have confirmed the special interest in health and healthy practices among the Polish middle class similarly to the middle classes in Western countries.