THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SUBJECTIVE WELL-BEING AND THE QUALITY OF LIFE OF WORKERS IN VIETNAMESE COAL MINING ENTERPRISES

Coal mining research has mostly examined accidents and occupational disease; how miners evaluate and experience their own lives has received far less attention, especially in Vietnam. We asked whether subjective well-being (SWB) is linked to quality of life (QoL) among Vietnamese coal miners. Following Diener's multidimensional view of SWB and the WHOQOL framework, we treated SWB as a second-order construct (positive affect, reverse-coded negative affect, life satisfaction) and QoL as a second-order construct (physical health, psychological health, social relationships, environment). A cross-sectional survey of 238 workers from five coal-mining enterprises in Quang Ninh Province was conducted in 2024–2025 and analyzed with SPSS and AMOS. Scales showed adequate reliability and convergent validity, and the second-order CFA fitted the data well. In the structural model, higher SWB was associated with better QoL (β = 0.612, p < 0.001), accounting for 37.4% of its variance. Supplementary analyses pointed to negative affect: with all three SWB components entered together, the reverse-coded negative-affect score had the largest coefficient (β = 0.298, p < 0.001), indicating that lower negative affect was associated with better QoL. QoL also differed by job type, with direct extraction workers scoring below electricians, surveyors, and equipment operators. This study is, to our knowledge, among the first to test a second-order SWB–QoL model in a high-risk occupational group in Vietnam. Well-being programs in coal mining should therefore go beyond technical safety to include psychological care, stress reduction, better working conditions, and social support, targeting direct extraction workers first.