happiness noun
a : a state of well-being and contentment
Introduction
Happiness is a term universally understood to be associated with positive and self fulfilling feelings. As stated by Ban Ki Moon, the former UN Secretary General, in 2014, “happiness is neither a frivolity nor a luxury. It is a deep-seated yearning shared by all members of the human family. It should be denied to no one and available to all.” Happiness is interesting because it can come in many forms and means different things to different people, making it subjective; however, as stated earlier, it is loosely united by its associations with positive feelings.
As people typically strive to achieve happiness in their lives, researchers began attempting to form ways to measure causes of/factors associated with happiness through various objective measures, such as the creation of the Cantril Scale in 1965, Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness in the late 1970s, and the Satisfaction with Life Scale in 1985. Although these measures are very informative, analyzing something subjective through objective measures is challenging.
For our project, we use the World Happiness Report in 2020, which ranks 156 countries’ social well being (SWB) based on the Cantril Ladder test, as well as measuring 6 other factors: GDP per capita, social support, life expectancy, personal freedom, generosity, and corruption. The dataset comes from information collected by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, Gallup, and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Ultimately, this data set is significant because its utilization of research and literature from various disciplines helps provide a base to show how happiness throughout the world can be measured objectively; however, it may also be missing some potential explanatory variables, allowing for us to utilize other scholarly sources to in conjunction with the dataset to make a more comprehensive report on happiness.
Place in Literature
In the various articles we read concerning predictors of happiness and overall self satisfaction, we noticed that oftentimes, there were some commonalities in the articles. Firstly, each of the articles acknowledged that happiness is something which is multidimensional and thus, impossible to measure based on solely one variable; however, somewhat in opposition to this idea, many of the articles were also focused on measuring the association of a certain variable (such as Fidrmuc et al 2015 with religion, Diener et al 2010 with income, Martela et al 2020 with types of government, and Wierzbicka 2004 with language) with happiness.
The main debate comes what are the different types of happiness, as well as what comes more from objective measures of a quality of life, or subjective factors that shape a person’s outlook on life. For instance, Martela et al 2020’s main focus on happiness in Nordic countries points to general life satisfaction as being what happiness is and focuses on more objective factors, such as income and types of government, as being the explanatory variables for that happiness. On the other hand, Diener et al 2010’s focus on income and happiness also focuses on an objective variable (income), but splits into different types of happiness (such as day to day emotions and overall view on life). Fidrmuc and Janali’s focus on the relationship between religion and money focuses on a subjective view of happiness (religious belief), but doesn’t exactly distinguish different types of happiness.
Overall, the literature is somewhat fragmented yet united by the thread of a general consensus on happiness being one’s well being, whether long term (how one views their life), as well as short term (day to day emotions); the questions regarding happiness are also somewhat fragmented, as many different studies, as mentioned earlier, study one specific variable in isolation and its relation to happiness. The closest thing to our study is the dataset we utilize (the World Happiness Report), which analyzes 6 different explanatory variables that are numerical in association with the Cantril Ladder, a single measure of happiness; we hope to build off from this start and address different types/definitions of happiness and how it’s measured, as well as combine existing literature to analyze how happiness has been measured in the past and see how different variables might be related to these different types. While we acknowledge that many authors and individuals will have disagreements, as happiness is very personal and many exceptions exist, we hope that our project can help provide a more balanced synthesis of the existing literature and help provide a more united yet inclusive perspective into global happiness.
Significance
This project examines and analyzes the findings of the 2020 World Happiness Report dataset to see what the relations between its 6 explanatory variables and a country’s average happiness are, as well as determine whether its rankings accurately account for all happiness across different countries. This can help others understand how international data could favor certain definitions of happiness over others, as the report is commonly used to compare countries and draw conclusions about where people live the happiest lives. These conclusions typically do not fully account for cultural differences in how happiness is understood and expressed, so we hope to make a more comprehensive happiness report based on available data and articles to help others understand how measuring something subjective with objective measures can bias certain cultures/regions depending on the criteria used.
This introduces the idea of how the same idea can be measured in different manners (as we do by talking about other measures of happiness used). Many of the report’s measurements emphasize individual freedom and self-reported life satisfaction, which may align more closely with values found in an individualistic society. In collectivist cultures, happiness may be connected to family responsibilities or community relationships instead. As a result, people in collectivist countries may report their life satisfaction differently even when they have strong social connections and stable living conditions.
When we compare countries with similar levels of wealth, health, and political stability but different cultural values, this project provides a different perspective when it comes to global happiness rankings. It also helps connect larger questions when it comes to the data and who is creating it, as well as whether or not one standard can accurately reflect the experiences of people across many cultures. In the end, this dataset helps others understand that the World Happiness Report is useful, but its rankings should not be treated as a universal measure of well being across the globe.