Older people are happier than younger
Here’s an interesting bit about happiness. At least according to one piece of research, happiness correlates positively to age. The finding? Older people are generally happier than younger people. Here’s a snip from a piece in the Seattle Times.
Since 1972, researchers have conducted 50,000 detailed interviews with Americans. The questions of the General Social Survey are repeated year after year to enable researchers to detect trends and to make comparisons among groups and to see how the same people changed over time. One asks whether they are very happy, pretty happy or not too happy.
“One important finding was people who were biologically older are happier than younger adults,” said Tom Smith of the University of Chicago, who is the director of the General Social Survey.
The study, conducted by researcher Yang Yang at the University of Chicago, used the granular detail of the survey to eliminate the possibility that older people seemed happier because they were raised in a generation that was taught from an early age to be content with its lot.
Rather, Yang found, in research published in the American Sociological Review, those older than 65 had not always been happy. It was being older that conferred the contentment that many of them reported.
“It is counter to most people’s expectations,” said Smith, who spoke about Yang’s paper because she was not available. “People would expect it to be in the opposite direction — you start off by saying older people have illnesses, deaths of spouses — they must be less happy.”
Smith said he and other colleagues had also examined the phenomenon from a different perspective, by asking people about their problems — including physical ailments, problems with relationships, losing a beloved family member and becoming the victim of a crime. Smith found that older people reported a larger number of health problems but tended to report far fewer difficulties overall — fewer financial, interpersonal and crime problems.
The younger adults, Smith said, had less trouble with their health but had many more of the other kinds of predicaments, and those, in the long run, tended to trump their better health.
Here’s what you need to know about the General Social Survey . . .
The General Social Survey (GSS) is one of NORC’s flagship surveys and our longest running project. The GSS started in 1972 and will begin its 27th round in 2008. For the last third of a century the GSS has been monitoring social change and the growing complexity of American society. The GSS is the largest project funded by the Sociology Program of the National Science Foundation. Except for the U.S. Census, the GSS is the most frequently analyzed source of information in the social sciences.
The GSS contains a standard ‘core’ of demographic and attitudinal questions, plus topics of special interest. Many of the core questions have remain unchanged since 1972 to facilitate time trend studies as well as replication of earlier findings. The GSS takes the pulse of America, and is a unique and valuable resource. It is the only survey that has tracked the opinions of Americans over an extended period of time. The GSS is also a major teaching tool. We know of over 14,000 research uses such as articles in academic journals, books, and Ph.D. dissertations based on the GSS and about 400,000 students annually who use it in their classes.
Tags: GeneralSocial Survey, Happiness, Decision Making, NORC, University of Chicago