Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product.” However, it has been long debated what causes happiness. Our project delves into the idea of happiness and further researches the factors that affect it. In the realm of digital humanities, our team is interested in correlations between various factors that influence happiness, which factors are the most indicative of happiness, as well as any regional trends of happiness throughout the world. We argue that there are connections and correlations that would lead to trends in our visualizations.
Using the data from the World Happiness Report of 2020, our team analyzes the survey results of 156 countries around the world. Specific to this data set, “The World Happiness Report 2020 for the first time ranks cities around the world by their subjective well-being and digs more deeply into how the social, urban and natural environments combine to affect our happiness” (World Happiness Report). Through this report and our website, we hope to holistically display our investigation’s findings on how different countries view happiness as reported from this survey and further understand the complex intersections within this topic that could affect how different individuals and communities view happiness.
The World Happiness Report is a publication of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Many other research organizations also contributed to this report (i.e., University of Oxford, Centre for Economic Performance, etc.). From 2012 to 2022, they have published 10 reports. Every World Happiness Report contains articles and rankings of national happiness, based on respondent ratings of their own lives, which the report also correlates with various life factors. One important note is that the year associated with each report is the year the report was released, not the year the data is collected from, so the World Happiness Report of 2020 explores data from 2019.
Through this timeline, we can explore how the research goals of the World Happiness Report changed from year to year up to the report our project focuses on: 2020.
