Does Money Buy Happiness?
By Ted Goertzel
My Hypothesis
• People with more money will be healthier
• But this relationship is spurious
• Marriage is the more important cause of
happiness
• Married people are have higher incomes
and are healthier when compared to others
of the same age
DATA
• My data came from the 1988 General Social
Survey
• The Sample Size was 2832
Variables
•
•
•
•
•
Marital Status: married or not
Age in years
Family Income in dollars
Health: fair/poor, good or excellent
Happy: not very, pretty happy or very
happy
Bivariate Analysis
• Bivariate crosstabulations showed that all of
my independent variables were
• [Note: if I were doing this as a PowerPoint
presentation I would have to type these
tables into PowerPoint to get them to look
right. However, for a Poster, you can just
print the Microcase tables]
Multivariate Analysis
• The path analysis shows the multivariate
relationship between the variables
• Health and being married are much stronger
determinants of happiness than income
• Married people have a higher family
income
• Health and income decline with age
Path Diagram
• Note: for a PowerPoint presentation, I
would have to get the diagram into
PowerPoint from Word. I don’t know of
any good way to do this other than to scan
it. If the path diagram had been created
entirely with the Draw tools in Word, it
would copy.
• For a poster, you can just print the diagram
with word
Conclusions
• To have a happy life
• Get married
• and stay young