Final Blog Post: Happiness

                My group and I focused on the very broad topic of happiness for our project this semester. Our research focused on discovering why some countries are considered happier than others. We considered the three major happiness polls (the Prosperity Poll, Gallup Poll, and the UN Happiness Poll) to choose our main countries. Ultimately, we chose the nations of Bhutan, Denmark, and Mexico for our research because they were some of the happiest countries in the world, but seemed so different from each other. Our research covered the positive effects that government, weather, environment, religion, homogeneity [racial and religious homogeneity creates less conflict because people can relate to each other,] and positivism could have on national happiness; this is not only proven in the Gallup and UN Happiness Poll, it is also proven in our sample countries.

Bhutanese Children Playing

                Working as a group helped us have varied resources, research, and perspectives. Having five people work together to come up with sources helped us create valid well-backed up research to prove that a nation’s happiness is based on government, weather, environment, religion, homogeneity, and positivism, and not just on material wealth or a nation’s GDP. We found most of our research separately on news websites such as The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, and PBS, the official websites of the countries we featured, and the websites from the organizations conducting the polls, and showed our individual research to one another. Working as a group not only helped us gather a lot of research, it also helped us gather different perspectives about what exactly creates happiness. We were able to edit each other’s work and see what really worked to prove our point in a respectful way, which helped keep our posts cohesive and organized. We worked on all of the posts together, which worked well for us as a team.

Happy Danish People at a Soccer Game

                I learned so much from working on the happiness project throughout the semester. I really enjoyed working with the people in my group, which was a pleasant surprise, because I usually dislike group projects. We worked really well as a team and all collaborated in our own ways. I learned that the more people involved the more research you find, and there will be more perspectives that the research will cover. While doing our research we found both the negative and positive aspects of seemingly perfect and happy countries. For example Denmark, the fourth happiest country according to the 2014 Prosperity Poll,

A cheerful Cinco de Mayo celebration in Mexico

also has the one of the highest suicide rates in the world; however they also have a great affordable healthcare system which allows them to seek help for depression regardless of economic standing, and ultimately achieve happiness in their lives. I also, most importantly, learned that while the countries seemed so different at first, they actually have the same ways of measuring and happiness. All of the countries essentially defined happiness as feeling satisfied and safe with their lives and government and cited religion and their families as things they turn to for happiness.