Data Critique
All data is created and therefore subjective and likely embedded with the biases of the creators. Our group’s main goal when examining the data set titled, The World Happiness Report 2020, was to determine what information was included and excluded, and why.
Before diving into the actual data itself, it was imperative to determine who and what allowed for the creation of it. As it turns out, the founding trio of editors (Jan-Emmanual De Neve, Lara B. Aknin, and Shun Wang) assembled in Thimphu in July 2011 in response to the Bhutanese Resolution passed by the General Assembly in June 2011, this invited national governments to “give more importance to happiness and well-being in determining how to achieve and measure social and economic development.” The Thimphu Summit was convened by Prime Minister Jigme Y. Thinley and Jeffrey D. Sachs to organize for a United Nations High-Level Meeting on ‘Well-Being and Happiness: Defining a New Economic Paradigm’ on April 2, 2012. In support of the summit, the inaugural World Happiness Report was published, bringing together accessible global statistics on country happiness and analyzing findings from the developing science of happiness.
In terms of funding, The Earth Institute at Columbia University oversaw the creation of the first World Happiness Report. The Center for Economic Performance at the LSE and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research provided research support through funds to the Vancouver School of Economics at UBC. Since 2013, the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and Jeffrey D. Sachs’ Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University have served as the central base for reports. The Ernesto Illy Foundation and illycaffè most recently provided a series of research grants to pay the administrative and research support costs despite the fact that the editors and authors were volunteers.
Another important aspect of the data is that it draws upon a diverse range of data collected, however the most important source has always been the Gallup World Poll, which is unique in the scope and comparability of its worldwide series of yearly polls. The Gallup World Poll’s life assessments serve as the foundation for the yearly happiness rankings, which have long piqued the public’s curiosity.
After taking into consideration who created and funded the data set, as well as what previous research and information the WHR2020 is based off of, we can look more deeply into what the actual data is telling us. The dataset ranks countries on a scale of 1-153 based on a “Ladder Score” which is calculated using interviewee’s subjective ranking on a scale of 1-10 based on the six categories: Social Support, Healthy Life Expectancy, Freedom to Make Life Choices, Generosity, and Perceptions of Corruption. The average Ladder Score is about 5.47, Finland is ranked number 1 with a Ladder Score of about 7.81 while Afghanistan is ranked number 153 with a Ladder Score of about 2.57. The dataset also contains standard error of Ladder Scores which illustrate how different the population mean is likely to be from the country’s ladder score. This illustrates the extent of inequality within a certain country’s rankings of happiness.
