What makes us happier?
Let's analyze historical data from Gallup World Poll Surveys.
Probably you’ve wondered every time you travel you see differences in happiness between people. Maybe you thought about countries where on average people have a positive way of seeing life than yours. This can have explanations or maybe not — but there is data that might explain the reasons why some people of each country are happier than others.
Happiness is difficult to measure as each individual is different, however, Gallup made surveys to create the Happiness Index. With these results, we can analyze data to have a better understanding of what makes us happier.
For this analysis, I used the data from Gallup World Poll Survey updated recently in 2021. The main goal is to observe countries Happiness Index and the relationship between variables and the Index. I used Python for data cleaning and Tableau for Data Analysis & Visualization.
Above we can observe the general map of the Happiness Index in 2021. Happiness is measured through a Ladder score between 0–10. We can see that countries with degrees of blue color have higher levels of Happiness and countries with degrees of orange color are the least happier. But what can we understand when we see the map?
According to the Ladder Score — North America and Western Europe are the regions with the highest level of happiness and Sub-Saharan and South Asia are the regions with the lowest level of happiness. North America's population is almost twice as happier compared to the South Asian population.
The top 5 happier countries are Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, and the Netherlands. Whereas the bottom 5 least happier countries are Lesotho, Botswana, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, and Afghanistan. The top 5 countries are twice happier than the bottom 5 countries. With this data, we can have an idea of the countries that are happier and by common sense, we may think about factors relating to the economical development of each country. Countries that are economically developed have a higher Ladder Score compared to the least developed countries — but let's try to understand what are the main variables that affect the index and prove this hypothesis.
Data provided by Gallup offers 5 different variables—Healthy life expectancy, GDP per capita, Perceptions of corruption, Social Support, Freedom to make life choices, and Generosity. On my regression analysis — Healthy life expectancy, GDP per capita, social support, and Freedom to make life choices had positive correlations with the ladder score. Perceptions of corruption have a negative correlation with the ladder score. Generosity is not significant with the ladder score therefore it was removed from the regression model. GDP per capita is the variable with the strongest correlation followed by Healthy life expectancy and Social support. The higher healthy life expectancy, higher GDP per capita, higher social support, higher freedom to make life choices, and lowest perception of corruption has a positive relationship with the ladder score.
Western European and North American countries seem to have the highest levels of Health life expectancy, GDP per capita, social support, and Freedom to make life choices. In this graph, we can clearly observe clusters of data for some regions. Western European and North American countries also seem to have low levels of corruption. This data can give us an understanding of why these regions perform well in their happiness levels. Some South Asian countries perform poorly in those metrics. Sub-saharan countries clearly perform poorly in Health life expectancy and GDP per capita. It's obvious that Western European and North American countries perform well but also Latin American countries perform well compared to the rest, their performance is similar to Central and Eastern European countries.
North American and Western European countries have been happier for more than 10 years since 2007 according to the data available. We can observe that in the last year's South Asian countries are becoming unhappier over the last years, they have negative growth. This brings into interesting analysis that shows that over the years Western European countries are becoming even happier. South Asian, Southeast Asian, Sub-Saharan, and Latin American countries are becoming unhappier over the last years. This might be a reflection that these regions are getting worse in the variables that have relationships with the ladder score. Another interesting observation is that North American countries are getting slighter unhappier.
Having these features define our happiness?
There are clear characteristics that explain happier and unhappier countries. Happier countries tend to be less corrupt, be wealthier, have social support, and be freer. However, in my opinion, these distinctions don’t give us the certainty that we are going to be happier if we live in these countries. Each individual is different has their own metrics. We can analyze thousands of variables but will never give us the certainty of our happiness.
I’ve lived in countries such as El Salvador, Brazil, Portugal and I’ve traveled to different profiles of countries — my experience living and visiting these countries has shown clear evidence that characteristics presented in this analysis might influence positively such as greater wealth, healthier life, less corruption and the freedom to make life choices but this is not true for everyone. It will be interesting to analyze in the future the long-term impacts of the COVID-19 on our happiness.
