Contents

Scope:

• Distributions of happiness in nations, as observed in representative samples of the adult population.
• Only findings based on survey questions, that validly tap an individual's 'overall appreciation of his own life-as-a-whole'.

Coverage at 1-4-2012

• 4335 distributions in 159 nations between 1945-2011.
• Responses to equivalent questions in 148 nations 2000-2009
• Time series for 15 countries of twenty years and more.
• All first and (former) second world countries, and also data from some third world nations.
• Fairly complete up to 2010

Features: .

• Happiness indicator: full text of survey questions.
• Statistics: frequency distribution in %, mean and standard deviation. Comparison is facilitated by transformation of all scores to range 0-10.
• Number of respondents, non-response.
• Bibliographics: author, title, year of publication, page reference.
• Survey name: name of survey program or institute, location of datafile.

Extra facilities in full database (not on this site, available on request in MS-Access)

• More detail about sampling and interogation
• Additional cross-national data on happiness in special groups (children, students, aged people)
• References to research reports and datasets
• Text of questions in other languages than English
• Weights used in transformation of responses to scales using verbal response options to numerical range 0-10