There are aspects of the human condition that are difficult to measure, such as whether people are happy with their lives, or find themselves instead under stress.
Are we, for example, more relaxed and comfortable with our lot when living in cities or suburbs or in country towns or villages, or in the countryside?
It may seem odd to look for evidence on such an issue in population census results relating to issues of disability, but it is in fact in the most recent volume of the 2006 Census, dealing with disability, that I have found some useful clues to this issue.
The first census to address the issue of disability was that carried out in 2002, but it confined itself to physical disability.
But the 2006 census has also secured and published data on two other forms of disability: learning or intellectual disability, and psychological or emotional conditions that may prove impediments to individuals leading a full life
Clearly the severity of the latter kinds of problems can vary with and be influenced by such factors as gender - and these data suggest that 10 per cent more women than men suffer from such problems - but also from the conditions in which people live.
The type of community in which people reside may either ease or aggravate such problems.
Are there significant differences in the scale of such problems as between Irish cities, town, villages and countryside, and are these less frequent in some sizes of town than in others?
To what extent do such problems increase with age? And are married or single people more prone to problems of this kind? An examination of the recently published data provided by the 2006 census yields answers to some of these questions.
Account must, however, first be taken of two potentially distorting factors: first, the location in some towns, but not in others, of institutions that cater for people with psychological problems.
And, second, differences in rural and urban age profiles, and in particular between the proportions of older and younger people in individual towns.
The possible distorting impact of the location of institutions in particular towns can be partly dealt with by using as the basis for such an analysis the number of people living in private dwellings rather than the total population of an area.
And, whilst the data in respect of an individual town can still be distorted by the extent to which such institutions exist within its boundaries, that is unlikely to introduce a significant distortion in the case either of a city or of large groups of towns of similar size.
Thus the data in the accompanying table offers a reasonably reliable guide to the levels of psychological and emotional disability in different kinds of locations.
It will be seen that, with the single exception of Cork, the proportion of people who experience this kind of problem is almost identical for all cities and size groups of towns down to those with about 3,000 population.
However, in smaller towns of 1,000 to 3,000 population, which perhaps lack certain urban amenities that larger towns can offer, the rate of psychological or emotional disability is about 10 per cent higher.
But, interestingly, below that size of urban area, as one moves from towns down to larger and then to smaller villages and eventually to the rural areas, the proportion of people with psychological or emotional problems drops markedly, so that rural areas emerge as almost 40 per cent better in this respect than towns with 3,000 or more people.
Whilst all these percentages are small, the differences between them are nevertheless quite significant.
Of course, the data for different sizes of urban areas represent averages of between 30 and 60 towns, within which there are very substantial variations between individual towns - variations only a small fraction of which are accounted for by differences in the age composition of different towns.
Because the great majority of people are between 15 and 64 years of age, the overall effect of age differences upon the proportion of people with psychological or emotional disability in different towns accounts for only a small part of the quite large differentials in these kinds of non-physical disabilities.
Thus the very low rates of psychological or emotional disability, (between one-half and 1 per cent in Dublin commuter towns like Duleek, Trim, Kilcock, Kilcullen and Enfield, all 25 to 30 miles from Dublin), suggests that the stress of commuting such distances may not be having such adverse effects on people's lives as has sometimes been suggested.
By contrast, a number of towns around the country have high rates of psychological or emotional disability, but - fortunately perhaps - there isn't space to list them here!