Measuring the quality of life university students and its predictors as a basis for its applied research. Cross-country evidence

• Assessed quality of life (QoL) among university students in Slovakia, Czechia, Poland, Hungary, and Spain. • Identified key predictors of QoL, including happiness, trust, and family relationships. • Found notable differences in QoL between Central and Western European countries. • Highlighted the significant role of relationships with parents and grandparents post-pandemic. • Determined financial satisfaction as a unique predictor of QoL in Slovakia. The paper is focused on the quality of life of university students in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Spain and its indicators and predictors. University students represent a specific demographic group due to a combination of age, education, and health. Paper has several goals. The first goal is to determine the value of the quality of life of university students in the mentioned countries and to determine the degree of their similarity/difference. The second goal is to compare their quality of life with the quality of life in individual countries. The third goal is to investigate which of the indicators have an impact on the quality of life, and thus are its predictors. Two scientific questions are formulated. Firstly, we are interested in whether there will be a difference between quality of life in Central European countries and Western European Spain. Secondly, we aim to find which predictors there are in common in the studied countries. In other words, we examine what the Quality of Life of university students in five countries is and what determines it to be the way it is.