I’m really excited to see this work! I know they’re not your variables, but having identified some top N variables (and possibly others of interest), it would be really helpful if you could dig out a concrete explanation of how each one was generated. E.g. ‘social support’ seems like it could mean any number of things, possibly different things to different people (my girlfriend suggested it might commonly be interpreted as effectively ‘happiness’, and so not really be telling us anything). ‘Feelings of freedom’ could be similar - ‘shelter’ sounds a bit more robust, but it still seems really important to understand what the number being given is.
For social support I had a very shallow look as far as the Helliwell essay and gave up when I couldn’t find a definition of/survey question representing it in there. I don’t have the bandwidth to dig further, but would really like to understand this better.
Thank you! And, good point, certainly something I should at least put in an appendix. The WHR variables are explained in their statistical appendices, which I link and quote here:
“Social support (or having someone to count on in times of trouble) is the national average of the binary responses (either 0 or 1) to the GWP question ‘If you were in trouble, do you have relatives or friends you can count on to help you whenever you need them, or not?’ ”
″ Freedom to make life choices is the national average of responses to the GWP question ‘Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?’ ”
Re: your girlfriend’s insightful comment, research has been done that demonstrates the question used for satisfaction is widely understood, and understand to be different than what we generally think of as “happiness.” In fact, trying to predict satisfaction with “positive affect” (a technical name for happiness) gets you an R^2 of only 0.27. By contrast, a model with “social support” alone gets you 0.52! So if they’re not even closely correlated, they’re definitely not being widely interpreted as the same thing.
I get into this more in the paper, but I argue that if social support really is so central, we really need to have a variety of variables on it, like we do for health and the economy. I use this one because it’s the one that’s there, and the effect is huge, but I’d really prefer to be able to draw on and analyze multiple aspects of relationships.
I’m really excited to see this work! I know they’re not your variables, but having identified some top N variables (and possibly others of interest), it would be really helpful if you could dig out a concrete explanation of how each one was generated. E.g. ‘social support’ seems like it could mean any number of things, possibly different things to different people (my girlfriend suggested it might commonly be interpreted as effectively ‘happiness’, and so not really be telling us anything). ‘Feelings of freedom’ could be similar - ‘shelter’ sounds a bit more robust, but it still seems really important to understand what the number being given is.
For social support I had a very shallow look as far as the Helliwell essay and gave up when I couldn’t find a definition of/survey question representing it in there. I don’t have the bandwidth to dig further, but would really like to understand this better.
Thank you! And, good point, certainly something I should at least put in an appendix. The WHR variables are explained in their statistical appendices, which I link and quote here:
“Social support (or having someone to count on in times of trouble) is the national average of the binary responses (either 0 or 1) to the GWP question ‘If you were in trouble, do you have relatives or friends you can count on to help you whenever you need them, or not?’ ”
″ Freedom to make life choices is the national average of responses to the GWP question ‘Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?’ ”
https://happiness-report.s3.amazonaws.com/2023/WHR+23_Statistical_Appendix.pdf
Re: your girlfriend’s insightful comment, research has been done that demonstrates the question used for satisfaction is widely understood, and understand to be different than what we generally think of as “happiness.” In fact, trying to predict satisfaction with “positive affect” (a technical name for happiness) gets you an R^2 of only 0.27. By contrast, a model with “social support” alone gets you 0.52! So if they’re not even closely correlated, they’re definitely not being widely interpreted as the same thing.
I get into this more in the paper, but I argue that if social support really is so central, we really need to have a variety of variables on it, like we do for health and the economy. I use this one because it’s the one that’s there, and the effect is huge, but I’d really prefer to be able to draw on and analyze multiple aspects of relationships.