Work & Happiness: An Overview
Tora Mullings
05-03-2022
Abstract
Work fulfills different needs a person may have. It may give them purpose, help them feel needed, and help them provide for their family. Depending on a person’s values, work can be seen as tantamount to other things in life. Some people feel their lives are meaningless if they cannot provide for themselves or loved ones financially. Not being able to work can have detrimental effects on a person’s mental well-being. On the other side, valuing work above all may have the same effect. In my project, I used the results of the World Values Survey from 2017-2020 to determine how happiness and the value of work are linked. The dependent variable was the rate of happy people in a country, and the independent variable was the rate of the belief that work should always come before spare time. I gave an overview of each relevant variable, including scatterplots that helped to visual relationships. The correlation coefficient between the independent and dependent variables was determined to be -0.305. The R-squared value was 0.0828. The results of fitting a linear model to the data showed that both coefficients were close to zero. Overall, the belief that work should always come before spare time is not a good predictor of happiness.
Context & Research Question
The World Values Survey tracks how people in different countries feel towards certain values, including the importance of work over spare time. Overall, it is a research program that aims to determine how change in cultural values over time affects factors such as economics, politics, and society internationally. Researchers conduct the survey in mostly face-to-face interviews, or over the phone when the residence of the interviewee is remote. In some cases, the surveys are completed by mail.
- Dependent variable : The rate of happy people in a country.
- Independent variable : The rate of the belief that work should always come before spare time.
Research Question:
What is the relationship between happiness and the belief that work is always more important than spare time?
Summary Statistics
Distribution of Variables
Rate of Happiness: World Map
“I believe work should always come first, even it means less spare time.”: World Map
Least Squares Regression Output
##
## Call:
## lm(formula = HappyTotal ~ WorkTotalAgree, data = df)
##
## Residuals:
## Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
## -29.488 -3.397 1.120 4.911 15.233
##
## Coefficients:
## Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
## (Intercept) 91.47518 2.35044 38.918 < 2e-16 ***
## WorkTotalAgree -0.11702 0.03973 -2.945 0.00418 **
## ---
## Signif. codes: 0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
##
## Residual standard error: 7.648 on 84 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared: 0.09359, Adjusted R-squared: 0.0828
## F-statistic: 8.674 on 1 and 84 DF, p-value: 0.004176| HappyTotal | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Predictors | Estimates | CI | p |
| (Intercept) | 91.48 | 86.80 – 96.15 | <0.001 |
| WorkTotalAgree | -0.12 | -0.20 – -0.04 | 0.004 |
| Observations | 86 | ||
| R2 / R2 adjusted | 0.094 / 0.083 | ||
\(\widehat{HappyTotal} = -0.117*WorkTotalAgree + 91.48\)
Pearson Correlation Coefficient: -0.305
Adjusted R-squared: 0.0828
Conclusion
Limitations
- Were the conditions for the least squares regression model satisfied?
Why is this analysis important?
- Nearly everyone works- do we all feel the same about it?
- Our sense of self-worth is affected by work.