Abstract
Understanding the interactions between happiness, self-perception of health, healthy eating behaviors, physical activities, and psychological feelings or symptoms of mental health provides necessary inputs for social policymaking. Using data from the second cycle of the Abu Dhabi Quality of Life survey, this study examined a path analysis of Abu Dhabi residents’ nature of assimilations between these variables. The results point to the significant association between happiness and self-rated health. In addition, the results portray significant direct paths to happiness from three mental feeling variables—“feeling calm and peaceful”, “having lots of energy”, and “feeling downhearted and depressed”. The variable of “often feeling rushed or pressed for time” shows a direct path to self-rated health only. Eating healthy food is significantly associated with both happiness and self-perception of health. In addition, “often doing physical activities” positively influences happiness. The present study enhances and refines policymakers’ understanding of the considered factors on happiness and self-rated health with further elaborations of the mediating roles of specific well-being determinants. Limitations and future research directions are also discussed.
Highlights
Accepted: 22 December 2021A better understanding of the determinants of happiness amongst people in a community could provide social policymakers with standard metrics that help analyze and compare the effects of different policies [1,2,3]
Many studies recognized health and happiness individually and in isolation, some existing research took a more profound understanding to further investigate the direction of effect between the two outcomes: does happiness affect health or vice versa? [72,73,74]. We investigate this understanding between health and happiness using an alternative conceptual framework, which includes the interaction of other related factors, such as subjective mental feelings, often doing sports, and eating healthy food
About 73.6% of respondents resided in Abu Dhabi, 22% resided in Al Ain, and 4.4% resided in Al Dhafra
Summary
A better understanding of the determinants of happiness amongst people in a community could provide social policymakers with standard metrics that help analyze and compare the effects of different policies [1,2,3]. [7] reviewed the relationships between happiness and sports and physical activities, while [8] synthesized research findings related to the impact of eating healthy food on happiness. Others, such as [9], analyzed happiness as a predictor of the mortality of the elderly adjusted for health and physical activity, while [10] discussed the role of certain mental feelings or intrinsic motivation indicators in influencing well-being. Some international research usually concentrates on selected social indicators that do not include health-related indicators [6,13], whereas
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