The World Happiness Report is a landmark survey by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network about the state of global happiness. Each year they survey people from more than 150 countries and ask questions about their happiness and other aspects in their lives such as social support, freedom, etc. The data published contains country level survey data, as well as some data related to country performance such as GDP and life expectancy.
The project is inspired by this report and we would like to look at what countries are happier and what makes people in a particular region happier than others through visualization of the 2016 data. The dataset used in this project and the definition of variables can be found under 'Data' of this page.
When we look at happiness score by country, we found that people in North America, Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe are the happiest, followed by Latin America. People in Africa have the lowest happiness score in general.
When exploring the relationship between happiness and GDP per capita, we found that Latin Americans are outstandingly happier comparing with other countries with similar level of wealthness.
The rest of the project focuses on giving this unusual happiness some possible explanations through examining the relationship between happiness and different aspects. We tried the theory of religion, social support and genetic gift by integrating external datasets to do further analysis.
Regression anaylsis by using panel data would be helpful to find out the reasons for happiness while controling for other variables.
Analysis
Codes of our analysis, including world map and line chart of overall happiness level and trend, scatter plots and box plot to show relations between variables
| Data |
|---|
| Original_2017_full The original dataset of World Happiness Report which contains data from 2008 to 2017 |
| Original_2017_region Region list used by World Happiness Report |
| relig_iso 2016 Globle religion population percentage data |
| DataSourcesAndVariableDef Data sources and variable definitions by World Happiness Report |
| Visualization |
|---|
| Heatmap_of_world_happiness Distribution of happiness level around the world 2016 |
| Happiness_trend Happiness scores from year 2008 to 2017 |
| Happiness_GDP Scatter plot to show the relationship between happiness scores and GDP per capita among regions |
| Happiness_religion Scatter plot to show the relationship between happiness scores and religion percentage among regions |
| Happiness_SocialSupport Scatter plot to show the relationship between happiness scores and social support among regions |
| Happiness_Gene Boxplot to show the difference on happiness level between two types of gene groups |
| Happiness_LifeExpectancy Scatter plot to show the relationship between happiness scores and life expectancy among regions |
| Happiness_Freedom Scatter plot to show the relationship between happiness scores and freedom level among regions |
| GDP_religion Scatter plot to show the relationship between GDP per capita and religion percentage among regions |
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