Happiness is truly unique & abstract — definitely not something that is readymade…
Happiness is such an abstract topic. Some might even feel that it is almost impossible to quantify happiness. But that’s precisely why happiness is such a fascinating topic — everyone defines their happiness differently. Someone might be happy having a million dollars in their bank account but another might be happy if they could volunteer more and spend more time with their family. I was looking into studies done on happiness (scientifically published to casual studies done among friends) and one, in particular, caught my eyes. It was a very uniquely conducted survey and I felt that having the open-ended conversational style meant it accounted for the openness and the abstract nature of happiness. Inspired by this article written by Christie Tang and the study she did, I decided to test it out for myself.
In all honesty, I didn’t have any hypothesis, I was in it to do some exploratory analysis and my questions while inspired by the study, were tailored towards my target population (undergraduates). Of course, my findings cannot be generalized but I did think there were some interesting findings based on my study. The study spanned 2 weeks and I spent the best part of those two weeks interviewing 50 students. It was taxing as conversations ranged anywhere from 15 minutes to 3 hours, but I would do it again if I had to. I was privileged to have this experience where people were willing to share some intimate details of their lives with me and it did bring some of us closer. So I will say I was thankful (and obviously happy) to have obtained this opportunity.
THE QUESTIONS
For those of you who are interested, I will list out the questions I asked, and if you aren’t you can skip to the later sections where I elaborate on some of my findings.
I collected some basic demographic information to see if I could see a pattern of sorts. Pretty much the usual — age, gender, race, religion, number of siblings, if they had pets, relationship status, working status. I also had some specific questions related to my target population like academic major, number of modules taken this semester, and year of study.
Then I moved on to the actual questions themselves. I asked them to rate their happiness on 3 different point scales. This was done at different times of the conversation and not in one go as I did not want them to intentionally compute by percentage or a ratio, but I wanted a more honest opinion based on how they felt. The reason for having 3 different scales was that I wanted to see if the scales mattered — does a higher scale mean you are less happy because there are more points to allocate for your wants (that are not very essential)? Or does a higher scale mean that you are happier because you simply have more points to allocate on an absolute scale? Or does it not matter at all? The three scales I used were 1–68, 1–29, and 1–139. I used very unorthodox numbers to intentionally put people off. Say, if I had given a scale of like 5, or 10, or 100 it would have been far too easy and I don’t think I can see how people react to having different scales — like do they have an invisible ceiling because of the scales? The main scale the study used was 1–68. The other two were just for comparison purposes.
I also asked my participants to elaborate on why they gave themselves that score, and if they felt they could ever attain peak happiness (68). I probed further and asked what would need to happen for them to hit the peak happiness score and allocate points for each of the mentioned factors. I also asked them to rate these factors when putting in the perspective of the other two scales.
THE DATA
It was obviously not the most orthodox of studies, so I was overwhelmed with the wealth of data I had in my hands and I just did not know where to start. The study being an open-ended, conversational style, I had to clean the data and make sense with it and find some sort of thematic groupings. Following that the first thing I did, was to run through the factors that would contribute to an increase in happiness and came up with a word cloud.
The most recurring words were, family, friends, and partner. These are all social factors. I had addressed in an earlier article which I wrote, why we are all possibly predisposed to social interactions and how they play a big part in our happiness, so it was interesting to see my data corroborate my research. More on the word cloud later.
I proceeded then to work with the demographic information I had and tried to make sense of it. Most of them did not affect happiness levels in any sort of meaningful way, but there were a few interesting findings.
Religion seemed like an interesting avenue to explore and I had tried to plot the happiness of an individual against their religions. The overview is shown below.
With such a plot, it was almost impossible to accurately make any conclusions or findings, so I tried to cluster the groups. After deliberating for a while, I decided on grouping atheists, people who were agnostic and free-thinkers into one group (having no religious affiliation) vs people who had a religion. The split was even, with 25 in each group and the resulting graph is below.
I ran an F-test to determine if there was any significant difference in the mean happiness of both the population samples. The variance seemed to be unequal and hence, I ran a T-test for unequal variances. I cannot statistically conclude (confidence level ≥ 95%) that religion has an effect on happiness, but I can say that statistically, I have about 81% confidence that having a religious affiliation DOES have some sort of effect on happiness.
Similarly, I looked into happiness based on gender. I did not plan for this, but again, the split in the number of people in each group were even (25 participants). I ran an F-test but this time, the variance in the means of both population sample can be assumed to be equal. While it seems females on a whole tend to be happier than their male counterparts, a T-test, concludes that gender does not play a role in determining the level of one’s happiness.
DISCUSSION
The word cloud was nothing out of the extraordinary. I did a lot of research and it did seem that social engagement plays a huge part in most people’s happiness. Unsurprisingly, being in an academic setting, results were also a factor — basically, people wanting good grades. Most of my participants, again rather unsurprisingly also wanted to have better time-management and a significant number of them were bogged down by stress. Finances and goals (aspirations) were also a factor and all these were rather unsurprising. Honestly, I don’t think any of those words drew my attention as they pretty much corroborated my earlier research. And it was nice to know that many more people, like me, would appreciate better and deeper relationships. Though sometimes I can’t help but wonder, are we doing enough? Do we go out and make the extra effort to sustain the quality relationship or are we too engrossed in our self-interest, that we neglect socializing? Is it something that we are bounded by the situation or are we building a fence around us? Can we take the extra step to renew our relationships?
While based on the upper quartile and means, females seem to be happier than the males of my sample population, none of them rated any higher than 60, while there were quite a few males who would rate themselves pretty highly in terms of happiness. Despite the lower mean happiness ratings, a larger portion of the male population (56%) believed they could attain max happiness as opposed to the opposite gender (48%). It seems like more females tend to put some form of “ceiling?” and it could be an interesting avenue to explore as to why this is the case. I did not account for this when I was formulating my study, but if I ever decide to do a similar study again, I might try to look into the reasons why there seems to be a ceiling such as possible societal/individual expectations. Another interesting point to note is that 71% of participants that claimed (academic) stress was a factor affecting their current happiness levels were male. A possible theory I had for this is that most guys were fresh out of National Service (NS) and had to readjust to the rigour and intensity of academia. A possible avenue to explore would be the happiness levels in males over time (i.e happiness in males in year 1 vs year 2 vs year 3 etc). I didn’t have enough data to do this comparison solely for males. However, I did it for my sample population and my data does seem to suggest that year 2s are happier than year 1s and year 3s are happier than year 2s as a whole (I did not collect data from students in year 4/final year). This holds true even if you split the data into their respective faculties. With the exception of one person, all those who wanted better grades, or something to that effect, were all from the Arts faculty. I am not sure why this is the case but maybe it could be due to the subjective marking? (It is not like Mathematics or Science where there is a clear right or wrong answer — most of them have to write essays and hence it is largely dependent on how they argue their points among other modes of assessment). Again, these are all questions I hope to raise in future iterations of such studies.
Regarding religion, I don’t think it was very surprising that people with religious beliefs rated their happiness as higher. There have been numerous studies suggesting that religion can play a part in one’s happiness. But again, I did find it somewhat interesting that not a single participant who does not have a religious belief stated they were above 58. I could probably attribute to the fact that religious people tend to be spiritual and find joy in the littlest of things. Having hope and belief, or even simply being grateful/thankful could heighten one’s happiness. However, having said that I did find it extremely intriguing that out of the people who believed they CANNOT attain maximum happiness, 54% of them had a religious affiliation and out of those who said they believe they can attain maximum happiness (however they define it), 54% of them had no religious affiliation whatsoever. I would think that more religious people would have felt they could attain maximum happiness. So I went and tried to understand these people and I realized that for some religious people, they had very idealistic expectations of maximum happiness — things that seemed rather improbable. Their happiness depended on external (and sometimes almost unattainable) factors more so than internal ones. Some had an idea of how the world should be and only then will they be able to attain maximal happiness. So it got me thinking, maybe instead of religion, we could see how people view life, their perception, their thoughts, and outlook, and do similar thinking people rate their happiness around the same levels? For example for some of my participants, attaining a particular goal or want would instantly give them maximum happiness. This is something I would love to expand on and do in the near future. Of course, there are other variables as well such as how devoted and religious one is and it would be interesting to draw some sort of conclusion, but I think the outlook on life is less splitting and more telling as people regardless of religious beliefs can have a similar outlook on life.
Just to make it easy for those of you reading, I have decided to put the results I’ve discussed into one image here so you can take another look at it. If anyone feels compelled to explore the dataset/have any queries, feel free to reach out to me and I would love to have a discussion regarding the study/further avenues that we could touch on.
CONCLUSION
I was definitely taken aback when I was compiling the results of the scale. I was expecting some sort of variations but they were largely consistent. For example, the average happiness levels as a percentage across all 3 scales were about 67.76, 69.86 and 70.76. Even the standard deviation as a percentage of the scales was about 13.32, 13.48 and 14.74 respectively. There wasn’t too much of a variation despite the scale being so arbitrary. The reason why this was rather shocking is that not everyone was doing the math, some people just went by their gut feelings for the respective scales. Are we then just that accurate in determining our own happiness, which would make our subjective assessment of happiness very reliable or are we just predisposed to subconsciously look at it in a logical way (using math) and deciding on a number which we feel with representing us best? But this for sure made me think about how reliable subjective assessments can possibly be. The scales were totally random, yet their assessments weren’t.
If you have made it this far and haven’t read this article yet, I would highly recommend it as it is what my study is based off and there are some interesting insights she touches upon and were corroborated by my findings and as such, I did not list them out in my article.
I think it is also important to note that happiness is largely time-dependent and too much of a want might not be that good of a thing. In other words, I might want to read a book now and that will increase my happiness, but if I had to do it for 8 hours straight, I probably wouldn’t be all that happy — essentially it is bounded by the law of diminishing marginal returns. Also, happiness can be pretty volatile in nature. A small event might lead you temporarily less happy/happier than you are and if I had conducted my survey at that time, you are likely to be more affected by that event as opposed to if I had asked you a week or so later. There is also the notion of an idea of happiness and a reality of happiness. For instance, if someones say they would be happier if they travelled, but they have never experienced travelling — how would they be able to say that that would make them happier? They might feel it would make them happier, it possibly could but without ever experiencing, one can never truly tell if they will be happier and to what extent. We could possibly sieve out responses based on an idea of happiness vs their of reality of happiness and see how participants allocate the points, or rank their happiness etc.
It would also be interesting to point out that people looked at the scales differently. Some viewed it as a ceiling, so when I raised the scale to 139, they started thinking of secondary and non-essential wants. It seemed like they viewed happiness as transactional and that I had just given them the liberty to spend more “points to purchase happiness”. So are people unknowingly placing a glass ceiling over them?
So is happiness really transactional or is it a freebie in which we have control over?
