Does Money Buy Happiness?

1
Does Money Buy Happiness?

• By Ted Goertzel

2
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

3
DATA

• My data came from the 1988 General Social Survey
• The Sample Size was 2832

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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

5
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

6
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

7
Path Diagram

• Note for a PowerPoint presentation, I would
  have to get the diagram into PowerPoint from
  Word. I dont 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

8
Conclusions

• To have a happy life
• Get married
• and stay young