Introduction

Many people believe that children are suppose to be light of your lives, the cliche story is to find your soulmate, get married, and have children usually after obtaining a bachelor’s degree or higher. After having children your life is complete, right? That’s not always the case, there is this notion that children and a higher degree brings you joy. But what about the people who can’t have children or don’t even want children, or don’t want to further their education? are they not content with their lives because they don’t have children running around or a degree framed on your wall? Berenice and I will explore this theory of peak happiness is when you have children and receive a bachelor’s degree or higher.

The data set we use came from GSS Data Explorer. The data set contains of of 32 variables here are some of them: year: numeric, id:numeric, ballot: numeric, age: numeric, childs: numeric, sibs: numeric, degree: factor, race: factor, sex: factor, region: factor, income16: factor, religion: factor, happy: factor, partners: factor, wtssall: numeric, income_rc: factor, religion: factor, bigregion: factor

In our exploration we are using four variables; childs: numeric, degree: factor, siblings: factor, and happy: factor to showcase that people that earned a bachelor’s degree that have children are happier than people who earned a high school diploma with children.

Graph 1 is a scatterplot that shows the density of how many children a person has compared to how many siblings they have. We added the color density to a graph to show a gradual distinction between the two variables. We see a slight positive correlation between how many siblings a person has compared to how many children they have. While most of the points are densely populated between having 0-2 children, the points become very scarce as you go past having ten siblings and more than 5-6 children.

Graph 2: The graph below shows a correlation between the number of children people have with their level of happiness. As shown in the graph, we can see that people are very happy with either having 0 children or two children. We thought that this was very interesting since the difference between having two children or 0 children is entirely different than having one child. With this data, we also saw that every time the number of children would increase, the level of happiness would decrease. With this being said, we also wanted to see the correlation between their highest degree they earned and the impact it had on their level of happiness.

Graph 3 is a stacked bar graph that separates each bar by each degree earned, filled with the three levels of happiness. The graph shows people who earned a high school diploma have the highest amount of pretty happy filled into its bar. Then it’s people with a bachelor’s degree. The level of happiness that was the lowest were those who did not earn a high school diploma. This graph is a good way to see the various data groups for degrees earned with their relationship with happiness.

Graph 4: With the previous graph shown, we also wanted to show this in proportions to distinguish the level of happiness in each category for the highest degree. We noticed the last graph had multiple proportions for each of the variables in each category, so we decided to make it one proportion. This graph would represent the different levels of happiness throughout the number of people surveyed. In this graph, we can see from the people who were surveyed that people who went to graduate school and earned a bachelor’s degree had more people who reported very happy while junior college and least than high school reported to be pretty happy. With this graph, we also wanted to see the scatter plot for the degree and number of children since we just found both of the data separately; we wanted to see the correlation.

Graph 5 is a proportional stacked bar plot that separates each bar by the number of children filled with the type of degree earned. The graph showcases that a large proportion of people who earned a high school diploma or less have more than four children, and people who have a degree higher than a high school diploma typically have less than four children. An interesting observation from the graph is that a good proportion of people who earned a bachelor’s and graduate degree have 6 or 7 seven children, which looks like an outlier in the data.

We then created a boxplot that showed the correlation between degree earned, number of children, and happiness level. Our graph shows that people are very happy when they have two children, we can see that in each category of degree earned, they are pretty happy. Another observation from this graph is that there is more of a variety of the number of children when it comes to the category less than high school and the level of pretty happy. The higher education categories like bachelor and graduate show that they are very happy when they have 0-5 children, which is the same as if the people who received a high school diploma. Overall, the graph shows that even though the bachelor and graduate people are very happy while having the same number of children as high school people. The bachelor and graduate people have a lower mean of the number of children than people who received their high school diploma.

Graph 7 shows a scatterplot of earned degrees less than high school of the previous boxplot graph. The graph was interesting to see because all of the boxplots don’t have as much variation for each level of happiness except for junior college and less than high school. It’s interesting to see the pretty happy data points spread across the scatterplot like the boxplot shows. It’s showing the variation the data has. For example, the graph shows the range that people either have 0 to more than six children and the people who were listed as not being happy had more than one child.