[Project]: Happiness Report
Report on World Happiness
March 10, 2022.
Introduction of the Dataset
The World Happiness report is used to gain global recognition as governments, organizations, and civil society increasingly uses happiness indicators to inform policy-making. The data contains four years of the dataset from 2015 to 2019, and the happiness scores and rankings use data from the Gallup World Poll.
Motivation Behind
There are many ways to define happiness, but happiness directly relates to our life quality, motivation, and satisfaction. We wanted to learn more about happiness levels in numerical data and compare the state of happiness in the world today. It is also interesting to learn whether happiness is related to money?
Business Questions
The following are the questions that we came up with to understand better.
- Top 10 highest happiness scores in 5 years
- Which region has the highest average happiness rankings?
- Is happiness correlated with each of the attributes: GDP, Life expectancy, Freedom?
- Are happiness and other attributes correlated among them by using a pivot chart?
Data Cleaning Steps
To clean data, we first started by downloading five different files from Kaggle. We delete some attributes that have lots of missing values. Next, we created a separate table showing the region using Vlookup for missing values. Lastly, we combined all the five different files as one data set. We also ensured no inconsistencies, spelling errors, space, or invalid characters in the data set.
Data Set
Variables include year, country, region, happiness rankings, happiness scores, GDP, life expectancy, and level of freedom. Happiness scores are based on metrics measured by asking sampled people the question: "How would you rate your happiness on a scale of 0 to 10 where ten is the happiest." Happiness rank is based on happiness scores. For freedom level, researchers asked participants on a scale of 0-1 where 0 is no freedom to make life decisions, and 1 has the freedom to make choices.
Summary of our project
Q1. Top 10 Happiness Scores Rankings in 5 years
We used the Pivot table and for creating this table, and the following are the details.
Rows: Country
Values: Average of happiness score
Filters: Years
Q2. Region with the Highest Happiness Score
We first created another region table for each county and then used Vlookup to find out regions for each country. Then, use the Pivot table sorted by happiness score(descending).
Rows: Region
Values: Average of happiness score
Q3-1. Correlation between Happiness Score and GDP
Q3-2. Correlation between Happiness Score and Life Expectancy
Q3-3. Correlation between Happiness Score and Freedom to make life choices
We used the Pivot table sorted by happiness score(descending). For the pivot chart, we used ‘stacked line with markers’ to compare happiness and other attributes for all countries.
Rows: Country
Values: Average of happiness score, Economy(GDP), Health(Life expectancy), Freedom(Make life choice)
Q4. Relationship between Happiness scores and related attributes
Limitations and Future Analysis
There are some limitations to this data. Happiness scores were measured by asking participants, "How would you rate your happiness on a scale of 0 to 10 where 10 is the happiest." Because they didn't define happiness and have precise measurements for the ratings, their scores might differ depending on each participant.
Also, it would be better if data had some more contradicted variables, unlike health, money that people might think is related to happiness but not really, such as having a new phone or having a new house.
Besides, this report only had a limited number of questions; if we dig deeper and look into the most recent data, there might be some difference in the outcomes analysis. We hope to have more questions answered in future studies, not only rankings and finding correlations. It would be interesting to know if any country experiences a significant increase or decrease in happiness or questions such as "Why do some countries rank higher than others? What are the factors?"
Conclusion
We found out that each variable contributes to happiness scores. However, participants weren't given the index of each variable, such as GDP, life expectancy, or freedom.
