Data Visualization Showcase
Context The World Happiness Report is a landmark survey of the state of global happiness. The first report was published in 2012, the second in 2013, the third in 2015, and the fourth in the 2016 Update. The World Happiness 2017, which ranks countries by their happiness levels, was released at the United Nations at an event celebrating International Day of Happiness on March 20th. The report continues to gain global recognition as governments, organizations and civil society increasingly use happiness indicators to inform their policy-making decisions. Leading experts across fields – economics, psychology, survey analysis, national statistics, health, public policy and more – describe how measurements of well-being can be used effectively to assess the progress of nations. The reports review the state of happiness in the world today and show how the new science of happiness explains personal and national variations in happiness.
What exactly is the Happiness Score? The happiness scores and rankings are based on answers to the main life evaluation question asked in the survey (Gallup World Poll). This question asks respondents to think of the best possible life for them being a 10 and the worst possible life being a 0. The other categories measured have no impact on the total score reported for each country, but they do explain why some countries rank higher than others.
The World Happiness Report Data in this Story This story uses two principal sources of data joined at the hip. The first is the World Happiness data (from 2016-2019) about the state of World Happiness (see https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2019/changing-world-happiness). The second source of data, Human Rights, is originallly derived by political scientist Christopher J. Fariss. Fariss’ assessment aimed to measure how a government protects its citizens’ physical integrity, by taking into account torture, government killing, political imprisonment, extrajudicial executions, mass killings and disappearances. He then employed statistical techniques to correct for changing standards. Its values range from −3.8 to around 5.4 (the higher the better). It is constructed from an econometric model with data from nine sources. The data is from 2016 - 2017 at https://ourworldindata.org/human-rights.
see overview_worldhappiness_visualstory.pdf for reporting and first draft link https://public.tableau.com/profile/renee.cothern#!/vizhome/world-happiness_visualization/Story-WorldHappiness