FINAL REPORT

GROUP – 10

Is there is a correlation between

freedom of life choices and the
happiness score of a country in the year
2015?

Shiva Sai Appishetty - sa20aax@herts.ac.uk

Akhilessh Sai Mutthoju - am20adj@herts.ac.uk
Venkatesh Tamminaina - vt20aan@herts.ac.uk
Shanil Gudivada - sg20aco@herts.ac.uk
Prasen Mogusani - pm20aba@herts.ac.uk

1
Table of Contents
Table of Contents..................................................................................................................................2
List of figures........................................................................................................................................2
List of tables..........................................................................................................................................2
Abstract.................................................................................................................................................3
Introduction...........................................................................................................................................3
Background.......................................................................................................................................3
Research Question Design.................................................................................................................4
Visualizations........................................................................................................................................5
Statistical Analysis................................................................................................................................9
Result...................................................................................................................................................10
Conclusion...........................................................................................................................................10
References...........................................................................................................................................11

List of figures
Figure 1: Countries plot.........................................................................................................................6
Figure 2: Scatter plot.............................................................................................................................8
Figure 3: Histogram...............................................................................................................................9

List of tables
Table 1: Null and alternate Hypothesis..................................................................................................5
Table 2: Countries with high freedom and happiness scores.................................................................6
Table 3: Countries with low freedom and happiness scores..................................................................7
Table 4: Hypothesis test result.............................................................................................................10
Abstract

Most nations across the world are considered to have the happiest civilians, these are the
nations that have few to minimal restrictions on life choices, extend their views to new and
modern thinking, having less corruption along with being the most defensive of civil liberties
(Michael
J. Abramowtiz, 2018). But the year 2015 saw many challenges because of the protruding
crisis that fuelled the prejudiced sentiments across democratic countries, hindering the
economies of the states depending on natural resources all of which led the imposing and
commanding powers of the state to pose a lot of restrictions on its civilians, these disturbing
events that developed across the globe has ultimately caused global freedom to plummet over
the year (Puddington and Roylane, 2016). This ultimately resulted in people across many
countries protesting against the governments and starting riots among many other unsettling
events. This had an undeniable effect on the state of global happiness, as stated in the world
happiness report. In this paper we study the world happiness report of the year 2015 as we
strive to answer the question: “Is there a correlation between freedom of life choices and
happiness score of the country in the year 2015”? Our findings reveal that there is indeed a
positive correlation between the freedom of life choices and the happiness score of the
country implying that as the level of freedom in a country increases its happiness score also
increases.
Index Terms – Gallup world poll, world happiness report, freedom to make life choices, happiness
score.

Introduction

World Happiness Report is an evolutionary landmark survey that aims at measuring the state
of global happiness. First published in 2012 at the United Nations during an event celebrating
International Day of Happiness on March 20th (Sustainable Development Solutions Network,
2017). The report aims at positioning 158 nations respectively based on their happiness levels
by research in various fields like economics, psychology, health, public safety, etc
(Sustainable Development Solutions Network, 2017). The report immediately picked up
expanding prevalence, and an updated version of the report was published each year
thereafter.

The Kaggle dataset we chose for this research is named “World Happiness Report” which
contains the reports of the years 2015 to 2019 portraying the happiness scores and the
happiness ranks of various countries (Sustainable Development Solutions Network, 2017).
Each year various factors were taken into consideration in ranking the countries selected,
however, six main factors namely happiness score, health (life expectancy), trust
(Government corruption), freedom, economy (GDP per capita) and generosity were primarily
considered to devise the ranking. All these factors describe the extent to which they
contribute to evaluating happiness in a country. The process and methods of how the
normalized values of these factors are obtained are mentioned in detail in the background
section mentioned below.

Background

The World Happiness Report derives all its data from the enormous Gallup World poll - a
massive poll which is conducted every year that interviews a random 1000 registered
civilian’s from over 150 countries who are appropriately aged 15 or above, these civilians
were each asked the same questions in their language which resulted in statistically
comparable results
(Hugo, 2018). The resulting data in combination with other data was used in the construction
of the world happiness report. Discussed below are the key factors that were considered each
year in building the report.

a) Happiness Score – Happiness score was obtained by a method known as the Cantrill
ladder; Civilians were asked “How would you rate your happiness on a scale of 0 to
10”, where 0 meaning they are miserable and 10 meaning they are very happy
considering all the different aspects of life (Sustainable Development Solutions
Network, 2017). The average of all the individual results was taken to derive the
cumulative happiness score of a country.

b) Economy (GDP per capita) – Economy indicates the gross domestic product per
capita of a country, here it is defined in terms of Purchasing Power Party (PPP)
adjusted to constant 2011 international dollars which were taken from the World
Development Indicators (WDI) released by the world bank (Helliwell et al., 2020).

c) Health (life expectancy) – Calculated by many different factors put forth by the World
Health Organization, Health defines the average “healthy” years a child is expected to
live at birth (Hugo, 2018).

d) Freedom – Freedom here indicates the freedom civilians have to make their own life
choices. Civilians were asked to answer either “satisfied” or “dissatisfied” to the
question “Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do
with your life?” where satisfied equals ‘1’ and dissatisfied equals ‘0’ as a part of the
Gallup world poll (Helliwell et al., 2020). The average of those binary values was
then taken which resulted in a single value that indicated the cumulative freedom of a
country.

e) Generosity – Generosity in a similar way is the average of the binary responses to the
question “Have you donated money to a charity in the past month?” from the Gallup
World Poll (Helliwell et al., 2020).

f) Trust (Government corruption) – Trust here means the perception of corruption in the
country, this is calculated by taking the binary average to two questions asked in the
Gallup World Poll “Is corruption widespread throughout the government or not?” and
“Is corruption widespread within the business or not?”, for the countries that were
missing data relating to government corruption, business corruption was taken as the
overall measure (Helliwell et al., 2020).

All this data provided in the world happiness report brought forth many interesting
viewpoints and perspectives towards the modern world we live in. Most of the world in this
day and age is free and nations have their administration and rules, there is also a general
perception that there is a relation between the level of freedom in a country and its happiness
score. The world happiness report consequently gives us an ideal occasion to investigate an
intriguing perspective outlined below.

Research Question Design

Our research presented in this paper primarily focuses on the World happiness report of the
year 2015 as we tend to investigate if the general consciences that freedom is directly
proportional to the happiness score of countries. Hence, we direct our focus on two attributes
which are “Freedom” which defines the level of freedom civilians have to make their own
life choices, and the “Happiness Score” which defines the average happiness of a country, as
we aim to find

“Is there is a correlation between freedom of life choices and the happiness score of a
country in the year 2015?”

We thereby form our hypothesis as mentioned in table 1.

Table 1: Null and alternate Hypothesis.

Hypothesis Variables assignment to the

hypothesis
Null Hypothesis H0: There is no correlation between the Freedom and Happiness score
"Freedom of life choices" and the "Happiness Score of a
country"
Alternate Hypothesis H1: There is a correlation between Freedom and Happiness score
the "Freedom of life choices" and the "Happiness score
of a country"

Visualizations

We begin our research by looking at columns “Freedom” and “Happiness score” from the
dataset as we aim to find if there is a correlation between freedom and happiness score of a
country, the column freedom consists of the average of the binary responses to the question
asked in the Gallup world poll, with all the values lying within 0 and 1, the highest value
being 0.66557 and the lowest being 0. As happiness score was measured on a Cantril ladder
the happiness score of the countries falls on a scale of 0 to 10 with the lowest value being
2.84 and the highest value being 7.59.

As both freedom and happiness scores provided in this report were interval data, we used
ggplot in R to visually represent the data and see where different countries were positioned,
this is shown in figure 1.
 Figure 1: Countries plot

It could be seen that many countries that fall on the top end of the spectrum concerning
freedom generally have high happiness score, Countries like Iceland and Norway where
civilians are given more freedom to choose what they do with their life and having freedom
values 0.62877 and 0.66973 respectively, also seem to have some of the highest happiness
scores as compared with other countries with the scores being 7.561 and 7.522 respectively.
Table 2: Countries with high freedom and happiness scores.

Country Freedom Happiness.Score

Switzerland 0.66557 7.587
Iceland 0.62877 7.561
Denmark 0.64938 7.527
Norway 0.66973 7.522
Canada 0.63297 7.427
Finland 0.64169 7.406

And countries that fall on the tail end of the spectrum concerning freedom like Syria and
Burundi whose freedom values are 0.15684 and 0.11850, some of the least compared to other
countries, have civilians who stated they are not very happy in general with the happiness
scores falling at 3.006 and 2.905 respectively.
 Table 3: Countries with low freedom and happiness scores.

Country Freedom Happiness.Score

Afghanistan 0.23414 3.575
Rwanda 0.59201 3.465
Benin 0.48450 3.340
Syria 0.15684 3.006
Burundi 0.11850 2.905
Togo 0.36453 2.839

This put forth a very broad and vague consensus that countries that provide their civilians
with more freedom posing less restriction on life evaluations are happier than the countries
that pose more restrictions on life evaluations and vice-versa indicating there is a correlation
between these two factors.

But that did not provide us with enough proof to answer if there is a correlation between
Freedom of life choices and happiness score as there were significant anomalies in the plot
that contradict the above statement. For example, Iraq which has the lowest freedom in
comparison to all the other countries with a shocking average freedom value of 0 has a
happiness score of 4.677 which is higher than Cambodia a country with a freedom value of
0.66246 which is higher than Iraq, happiness score of Cambodia is 3.819. Similarly, Rwanda
whose freedom is significantly higher than that of Sudan has a happiness score lower than the
happiness score of Sudan.

As we were unsure if there was indeed a correlation between the Freedom and the happiness
score of a country, we then plotted a scatterplot, which is the best way to check if a
correlation exists between two given attributes with interval data. As a scatter plot also
provides an option to include a linear regression this allowed us to check if there exists a
positive correlation or a negative correlation between freedom and happiness score, provided
if a correlation exists at all. The scatter plot we obtained is shown in figure 2.
 Figure 2: Scatter plot

From the Scatter plot, a general trend in the data can be identified, and with the visual
representation of the line of regression a positive slope of value 4.3174 can be observed this
indicates that there is indeed a positive correlation between the freedom of life choices and
the happiness score of a country in the year 2015, suggesting that as a countries freedom
value increased its happiness score also increased.
Looking at all the outcomes, we also wanted to see how the happiness score is distributed and
where most of the counties lie in regards to happiness score. We then plotted a histogram to
check the frequency of the happiness score which is shown in figure 3.
 Figure 3: Histogram

The above histogram shows the distribution of the countries concerning the happiness scores,
and it can be observed that the happiness score of most countries falls between 4.5 to 5 which
is just below the halfway mark, this says that most countries in the world were not very happy
in the year 2015.

Statistical Analysis

As a result of the visualization that we worked on, we concluded that “there is a correlation
between the freedom of life choices and the happiness score of a country” which is the
alternate hypothesis we formulated. To prove our findings statistically and to reject the null
hypothesis we performed the Pearson correlation test which yielded the result shown in table
4.
 Table 4: Hypothesis test result.

Pearson's product-moment correlation

data: data_2015$Freedom and data_2015$Happiness.Score

t = 8.6245, df = 156, p-value = 6.876e-15
alternative hypothesis: true correlation is not equal to 0
95 percent confidence interval:
0.4521891 0.6653233
sample estimates:
cor
0.5682109

The Pearson correlation test resulted in the p-value being 6.876e-15, as shown in table 4, as
the p-value is far less than 0.05 (p < 0.05) we statistically reject the null hypothesis which
states “There is no correlation between the Freedom of life choices and the Happiness Score
of a country” and we accept alternate hypotheses which state “There is a correlation between
the Freedom of life choices and the Happiness score of a country”.

Result
The correlation value between the two variables resulted to be 0.5682109 which indicates that
there is a strong positive correlation between freedom to make life choices and the happiness
score of a country indicating as the freedom of a country increases its happiness score
increases and as freedom of a country decreases its happiness score also decreases.

Conclusion
In this research paper, we looked at the data from the world happiness report for the year
2015 as we aspire to answer our research question “Is there is a correlation between freedom
of life choices and the happiness score of a country in the year 2015?”. We used R studio to
visually analyse our data and then performed the Pearson correlation test to accept one of the
hypotheses. We conclude our research by accepting the alternate hypothesis which states
“There is a correlation between the ‘Freedom of life choices’ and the ‘Happiness score of a
country’ “
References

1. Helliwell, J.F., Huang, H., Wang, S., Norton, M., 2020. World Happiness Report
2020.
2. Hugo, 2018. Happiness Index: What is it and How does it work? Happiness Index
What It Does It Work. URL https://www.trackinghappiness.com/happiness-index-
2018/#Freedom_to_make_life_choices (accessed 1.2.21).
3. Michael J. Abramowtiz, 2018. Freedom in the world 2018.
4. Puddington, A., Roylane, T., 2016. Freedom in the world 2016.
5. Sustainable Development Solutions Network, 2017. World Happiness Report. World
Happiness Rep. URL https://www.kaggle.com/unsdsn/world-happiness/metadata
(accessed 5.1.20).