Empirical Association between Education and Happiness in a Social Context

Gezim Zeqiri

doi:10.22178/pos.61-4

Abstract

Education level and the number of school years completed have an important function in each persons’ life and is considered as one of the most important aspects of socialization, fulfilment, income level, and general happiness. In particular, the number of school years completed is an important indicator which we intend to utilize to estimate educations’ impact on one’s life in general. Differently put, among many other aspects of educations’ impact on humans’ life, this article focuses on the relation between the highest numbers of school year completed and the general happiness of a person. The purpose of the article is to find evidence which proves that the general happiness and the highest school year completed are not statistically independent. Finding the correlation between these two variables is the objective of the article. For that purpose, we analyzed the empirical data provided by the General Social Survey (GSS) by conducting a chi-square statistics test to prove the existence of a relationship between the variables. Put another way, the research intends to analyze data provided by GSS2008.dta and test the null and alternative hypothesis by using chi-square statistics test and by applying the quantitative methodology of research. The data collected from 2,018 respondents provided by GSS are analyzed by utilizing State Software - as one of the most reliable and contemporary tools used by scientists nowadays.

Highlights

Does the number of school years completed impact peoples’ level of happiness? Are happiness and education-related? Is it worth it to expand energy and efforts to achieve the highest levels of education? Will this impact our level of happiness?
The purpose of this examination is to see whether an increased level of income caused by a higher level of education is significant to the general happiness
By comparing the variable of “general happiness” with the recoded variable “school-college”, we came to some interesting results

Summary

Introduction

Does the number of school years completed impact peoples’ level of happiness? To answer the above-mentioned questions, we will conduct research and analyze whether there is a relation between the accomplished years of education and the happiness level of people in the United States. The main research question of this article is as follows: Is there a relationship between education level achieved and general happiness? The article will be focused on the impact of the level of education on the overall happiness of a person. Based on the statistical output of the General Social Survey (GSS) variables, we will be able to see whether the increased level of education effects happiness

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion