What Makes People Happy

The twin issues of what makes people “happy,” and the relative strength of these happiness affecting factors, have in the recent past become a staple of economic analysis and goes under the rubric of “happiness research”. The aim of such research is to understand what the determinants of happiness are and how these vary across population groups, distinguished by a variety of socio-economic and demographic factors (for example, education, marital status, economic position, social class, and geographic location). A key component of this research is a person’s subjective assessment of their state of happiness and this assessment is sought to be correlated, using methods of multiple regression, with the multitude of factors hypothesised to affect it. The purpose of this chapter is to use data from the World Values Survey to provide a self-contained overview of this research, discussing the many variables that are conventionally included in the “happiness equation”, the justification for their inclusion, and the strength of their effect.