Three Levels to Our Project

Sources

Since the World Happiness Reports have been releasing their appendices and data tables from 2005 to 2023, we needed to narrow down which data set we wanted to use for our analysis. We focused on 2022 data, as it contained the most up-to-date information available. We sourced our data from Data for Table 2.1 which can be found under World Happiness Report 2023: Appendices & Data section (2023). The data set provides a comprehensive overview of every country included in the Gallup World Poll since 2005. The variables include Life Ladder, Log GDP per capita, Social Support, Healthy Life Expectancy at birth, Freedom to make life choices, Generosity, Perceptions of corruption, Positive affect, Negative affect, and Confidence in national government.

For our secondary sources, we not only wanted to get a better understanding of the World Happiness Reports but also a broader overview of other variables that impact one’s well-being that are not directly explored within the reports. From hereditary factors to economic measures to lifestyle habits, there are plenty of components that define one’s happiness. For example, we learned that 35-50% of happiness levels in a person can be attributed solely to hereditary factors, leading us to realize that our dataset would likely be unable to capture the nuanced differences that compose individual senses of happiness (Dariush et al., 2014). Additionally, we found that life stage is a crucial factor in determining subjective well-being and varies across different age demographics (Blanchflower et al., 2008). The secondary sources that we incorporated within our narrative not only gave us a better grasp of the data collection process, but also broadened our perspective, allowing us to further contextualize each variable.

Processing

The dataset was extremely clean and polished (no mistakes, duplicates, or suspicious entries), therefore, intensive pre-processing was not needed for this project. We simply dropped columns that happened to be dummy variables (variables that were a constant value for each row) and preserved the rest to be explored in our Variable Analysis section. We decided not to remove missing values, as Tableau’s dynamic methods of filtering data would remove rows as needed. There were also not many in the 2022 dataset to begin with.

We used an outside data table to create a “Continent” column for our Western Bias analysis. We found a dataset¹ online with countries and their respective continents and merged it with the preprocessed WHR data using the Pandas package in Python. Afterwards, we exported the dataset from Python into Tableau by saving it as a .csv file.

Within Tableau, we then coded the variables as discrete or continuous as needed and ensured that all geographical variables were properly designated. Since the 2023 table had data from many years, we made sure to filter to only include 2022 data in our non-time series based analyses,

Presentation

To build our project, we began by submitting a web-hosting request to UCLA’s Humspace service. We were able to establish our domain and began customizing our site through WordPress, a website publishing platform. We chose to apply the Lemmony theme throughout our website as it is visually appealing, easy to navigate, and provides us with a multitude of custom-built editor blocks. We integrated and customized several of their features within our website such as the LinkedIn button and navigation bar. Although we had difficulty finding pictures regarding “happiness”, we still wanted to incorporate images to balance the text. We did this by sourcing simple and aesthetically pleasing icons from www.flaticon.com. For our data visualizations, we chose to incorporate a red-yellow-blue theme and avoided monochromatic color schemes as we wanted to make the data visualizations inclusive and accessible to the most amount of people. We also wanted our visualizations to produce high-quality results while remaining straightforward for people to comprehend. We assured this by our intentional graph/chart choices and including all necessary legends, appropriate axes units/ names, and descriptive titles as per Nathan Yau’s visualization suggestions².