Money And Happiness Research Paper

Researchers have worked to achieve appropriate definitions of happiness. Happiness is a background baseline feeling and a most general positive emotional sentiment, which involves favourable evaluation of significant aspects of life, or of one’s overall situation, as both right and good (TenHouten, 2012: 182). According to philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), happiness is the sum of positive emotions minus the sum of negative emotions (Crane and Hannibal, 2009:93). Researchers are also working collaboratively to provide the appropriate relation between money and happiness. Therefore, researchers raise many questions on money and happiness, and one of those questions is “To what extent can money affect happiness?” It is important to investigate

Since it is a present and ubiquitous topic, so psychology researchers are working collaboratively to figure out the relation between money and happiness. There are many research studies done by psychologists and different organisations on money and happiness. One of them is Gallup Organization in the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index (GHWBI) who recently worked on subjective well-being. The data given by researchers Kahneman and Angus Deaton (2010) in GHWBI gives enough sources of observations and exceptional measurement of well-being. (Kahneman, 2010:16489-16493). Researchers of Gallup Organization worked with two aspects of subjective well-being. These are Emotional well-being and life evaluation. Emotional well-being relates to the emotional quality of an individual’s everyday experience, for example— frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affectionate that make one’s life pleasant or unpleasant. On the other hand, life evaluation relates to the thoughts that people have about their life when they think about it. Using these two aspects, researchers Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton from GHWBI attempt to show whether money buys happiness or not. (Kahneman,

In the analysing, the participants were 450,000 US residents. Researchers (GHWBI) used a daily survey procedure by calling participants on their cell phones and land lines, and the response rate for cell phones was typically lower than land lines. They use theoretical analysis by using dual-fram random-digit dial, which also provided people’s phone numbers from 50 states of US. Each day, they contacted with 1000 US residents. They interviewed them (participants) by asking several questions about their subjective well-being. Participants had to tell them about their current economic and financial situation, also about their health condition including past diseases, and other issues. The interviews were conducted between 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. (local time) with most done in the evening and they made up to five call backs in the case of no answer. 31% peoples from whom they had called were agreed to talk to them. 90% of those people who had agreed to talk had answered their questions and completed the whole interview. (Kahneman,