Relationship of Happiness to Income

OF GENERAL SOCIAL SURVEY DATA . . . . . .2

RELATIONSHIP OF HAPPINESS TO INCOME: A DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS OF GENERAL SOCIAL SURVEY DATA

Those who say that money can't buy happiness don't know where to shop.

The proposed research is designed to conduct a comprehensive investigation for a relationship between income and money using data from a national database. So that the research can be placed in context, the paper begins with a review of the pertinent research. The review is divided into four sections.

The first section examines and discusses the early research in the field. The second section examines more recent research. The third section presents a brief review of related theory and the fourth and final section summarizes the main findings of the literature.

Does money contribute to happiness? The existing research attempting to answer this question is rather ambiguous. For example, in some very early research in the area Thompson (1977) analyzed the relationship between the rec

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rom the ranking of the importance of the predictors in retirement revealed that socialization with family was the most significant factor and income was rated the least important. In another current study, Wu (1998) examined the relationship between television viewing, materialism and happiness with multiple regressions. Cultivation theory was said to posit that heavy television viewing was positively correlated with mispercep-tions of social reality and that this affects one's value systems. The results showed that the predictors of materialism were viewing of specific television programs, television viewing motives, individualism and peer communication about consumption. Materialism was negatively correlated with happiness. However, the most significant predictors of happiness in both materialists and non-materialists were self-esteem, family income and collectivism. Related Theory Jamieson and Sneed (1989) suggested that one reason for the ambiguity or mixed findings in research examining for a systematic relationship between income and happiness is that the happiness factor is too narrow a construct. They have suggested that what should be investigated is for a relationship between income and quality of life. Quality of lif
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Approximate Word count = 3469
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)

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