Abstract
This study aims to establish a quantitative relationship between lifestyle and happiness in the UK based on over 10,000 surveyed samples with 63 lifestyle variables from the UK Understanding Society Data. Transparent parametric models are built and a number of significant explanatory variables (lifestyle indicators) have been identified using a systems engineering modelling approach. Specifically; based on the traditional orthogonal forward regression (OFR) algorithm; the study introduces a new metrics; with which the impacts of lifestyle variables (and/or their interactions) can be quantitatively measured and identified one by one. These identified significant indicators provide a meaningful parsimonious representation of the relationship between happiness and lifestyle; revealing how happiness quantitatively depends on lifestyle; and how the lifestyle variables interactively affect happiness. For example; the quantitative results of a linear model indicate that lifestyle variables such as ‘health’; ‘income’; and ‘retirement’; impacts happiness significantly. Furthermore; the results of a bilinear model show that some interaction variables such as ‘retired’ together with ‘elder’; ‘fair health’ together with ‘low-income’ and so on; are significantly related to happiness.
Highlights
Lifestyle is known to be an effective cause of happiness worldwide
Happiness is affected by employment, which can be described by working hours, type of the job and incomes (Booth and Van Ours 2008; Ekici and Koydemir 2016; Lim et al 2017; Köksa et al 2017; Ward and King 2016)
This work proposed a new method to investigate the relationship between happiness and lifestyle by analyzing the UK Understanding Society (UKUS) Data
Summary
Lifestyle is known to be an effective cause of happiness (life satisfaction) worldwide. As people’s lifestyle may include views and habits on fields such as health, religion and politics and so on, it is necessary to find how these aspects of lifestyle independently or interactively affect happiness, in order to obtain transparent representation of the relationship between lifestyle and happiness. Numerous studies have been conducted to find out which aspects of lifestyle have significant impacts on happiness (Easterlin 1995; Fletcher et al 1990; Hills and Argyle 1998). According to some research, higher level of education neither produces higher happiness, nor the wealth, nor health (Veenhoven 1996; Sabatini 2014). IQ, which can be improved by education, can independently affect health status to indirectly influence happiness (Hartog and Oosterbeek 1998). There are many other aspects of lifestyle that could be potentially
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