An exploration of the relative importance of personal and societal factors in the determination of happiness

We examined how happiness and life satisfaction measures taken from the World Values Survey (WVS) and the World Happiness Report (WHR) varied internationally with five personal (health, having a partner, friendship, education, and income) and five societal factors (pollution, human development, peace, democracy, and inequality). Personal health and living in a democracy emerged as important factors. However, the most striking result was that the two surveys gave different answers to our fundamental question: the WVS results indicated personal factors were more important; the WHR results that societal factors are more important. One explanation for the difference is that the relative importance of the two factor sets might vary markedly with contextual issues like timing.