the sociologist's view...
When considering happiness from a sociologists point of view it is important to define clearly what happiness is. Sociology is:
“The study of human social behaviour – including its origins, development, organisations and institutions.”
And within this science of human behaviour happiness is defined as:
“Overall happiness is the degree to which an individual judges the overall quality of his/her own life-as-a-whole favourably. In other words: how much one likes the life one leads.”
Influences on societies happiness as a whole include economic stability, universal provision of basic utilities, type of government, comparison of one societies well-being to another and the albescence/presence of war, famine and natural disasters.
Some quantitative measures of the happiness of various societies include the Happy Planet Index and the National Well-being Measures (UK only). For the student society the National Student Survey, Times Higher Education Student Experience Survey and International Student Barometer are used.
Graphs 1 and 2 show some of the data collected by these surveys that show relationships between students satisfaction and money.
But what is the relationship between money and a good social life? A study conducted by the British Household Panel Survey between 1997-2003 of people aged 16-65 gave the following results.
The BHPS concluded that an individual with a poor social life would require compensation of around £63,000 pay rise per year compared to an individual with a good social life.
We conclude that while the relationship between money and happiness could be quantified, it was not essential to have money to be happy, but it could be used as a substitute for a poor social life.