Positive Experience Highly Correlated with Felt Active, Productive, and Goal-Driven
Abstract: We studied the correlation between people’s positive experience and if they “felt active and productive” as well as uphold the belief of “work hard, get ahead”. Being active, performing productive activities, and working hard are important ingredients to achieve positive experience.
Positive experience is derived from having a purpose — not any purpose — but a purpose with meaning, purpose with productive results, and purpose aligning with personal goals. For example, researches showed that leisure activities, though yielding quick gratification, don’t produce long-lasting joy.
Our research panel data sourced from the Gallup organization which provides the World Poll dataset as well as data from the World Bank which provide the operational profiles of countries. The synthesized dataset encompasses 54 different countries of the world with time spanning a total of 3 years from 2013 to 2015. The dataset has a total of 1,606 data points. The countries represented in the dataset are diverse including developed countries such as the United States, Australia, Switzerland, Canada, Singapore, etc. but also including developing countries such as India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Peru, Sri Lanka, etc. These countries also represent diverse mix of religions, cultures, geographical locations, and histories.
We use OLS regression to test the correlation between the Positive Experience Index (Gallup) and % of respondents agreeing or strongly agreeing with “Felt Active and Productive” or believing in “Work Hard, Get Ahead” (Gallup.) The OLS regression contains additional eight control variables sourced from Gallup and the World Bank such as age, education level, population size, etc. Importantly, we specifically controlled the OLS regression with a wealth indicator from the World Bank called the Gross Domestic Product by Purchasing Power Parity Per Capita with constant USD as the basis. We used this measure as one of the control variables to control the potential effect of wealth onto the measure of positive experience.
Our OLS regression results concluded that the Positive Experience Index is highly correlated with feeling active and productive or believing in working hard getting ahead. The OLS regression result is statistically significant at 1% with adjusted R-square at 0.76, while the coefficients for the independent variables of “Felt Active and Productive” and “Work Hard, Get Ahead” are both statistically significant and quantitatively significant. An analysis determining their relative importance of regressors indicates that they are equally important. Therefore, being active, productive, and goal-driven are important elements to achieve a Positive Experience.
