What Contributes To Happiness?

    The World Happiness Report is a survey conducted around the globe which asks individuals to rate their overall happiness on a scale of 1-10 and also asks which factors contribute to their happiness the most, which is then averaged out and grouped by country and region. In the dataset I recieved from Kaggle they used 6 distinct factors: “Health, GDP / Economy, Family Support, Trust in Government, Freedom, and Generosity.” Below is the trend of world happiness from 2015 to 2019 based on overall region.

    From the visualization we can see that the happiest regions reside in Australia / New Zealand, and North America, followed by Western Europe and Latin America, where the least happiest region seems to be Sub-Saharan Africa. And as far as trends go, the happiness score of these regions seem to be consistent year to year. Now, if we plot the happiness scores by countries instead of region we might get more insight on what contributes to happiness more.

    As you can see from the map, the countries which reported to be the least happy reside mainly in underdeveloped 3rd world countries, which leads us into an interesting question..

Can Money Really Buy Happiness..? Well, sort of..

    By running a correlation matrix on the data from the World Happiness Report, between the years 2015 and 2019, we can see that GDP / Economy is highly correlated with happiness, followed closely by Family Support, Health, and Freedom.

    If we plot the factors contributing to happiness from 2019, we can see that as the Happiness Score increases, the impact of GDP, Family Support, and Health also increases, with Family Support being the most important factor for happiness in 2019.

Conclusion

    In conclusion, from what the data has told us here, it appears that the main contributing factors to happiness are GDP / Economy, Family Support, and Health. By having more money you essentially have the power to have more positive experiences in your life, and easily solve stressful problems that ever occur. By having a family who supports you, you can be yourself, and feel love and share experiences with people you care about, and who care about you. And by having health, you’ll be able to experience life at the highest level, without worry, to do the things you love with confidence, clarity, and conviction.