Happiness Study Non Experimental Research Design Discussion Discuss reasons why it may be useful to study the topic of happiness via research. (20 marks)

Happiness Study Non Experimental Research Design Discussion Discuss reasons why it may be useful to study the topic of happiness via research.

(20 marks)

b) Recognise and explain why this happiness study is deemed to have used non- experimental research design, with evidence provided. In relation, suggest and analyse possible operational and ethical considerations that would discourage the use of experimental research design for this happiness study.

(50 marks)

c) Appraise and justify whether measurements taken by this happiness study are adequately valid and conclusions made by this happiness study are adequately robust. Develop recommendations on how to further enhance the validity of measurements and/or the robustness of conclusions for this happiness study, beyond the current level.

(30 marks) SSC211e
Social Science Research Methods
Tutor-Marked Assignment 02
July 2019 Presentation
SSC211e Tutor-Marked Assignment 02
July 2019 Semester
SSC211e
TMA02
This tutor‐marked assignment (TMA) is worth 20% of the final mark for SSC211e Social
Science Research Methods.
The word limit for this assignment is 1,200 words.
You are to include the following particulars in your submission: Course Code, Title of
the TMA, SUSS PI No., Your Name, and Submission Date.
Please upload this assignment to Turnitin by Monday, 26 August 2019, 11:55pm.
Resubmissions are allowed before this cut-off time.
It is strongly recommended that you make an early submission to check the originality report
and, if necessary, make amendments to your document for resubmission. Note that the
Turnitin report is usually generated immediately after the first submission, however,
subsequent reports may take up to one day to generate. Do note that Turnitin will not accept
any further submissions AFTER the cut-off time. There is a 12-hour grace period after the
cut-off time, which is not an extended deadline but solely meant for solving any technical
problems that you may encounter while attempting to make a submission before the cut-off
time. Please email Canvas Support immediately (with relevant screenshots and your TMA
attached) and follow up with Canvas Support first thing in the morning to ensure that the
problem is resolved before the grace period is over.
One late submission is allowed only if no prior submissions were made before the cut-off
time. Do note that the Canvas system will automatically deduct penalty marks for every day
that your assignment is late. With this automatic deduction, there will be no need to request
for extensions from your tutor because your tutor does not have the mandate to over-ride the
Canvas system settings. You will need to form your own judgement as to how many marks
you are willing to forego for each extra day that you gain to work on your assignment.
Take care to ensure that you upload the correct TMA document to the correct folder of the
correct course. Requests to transfer incorrectly uploaded documents to the correct folder will
require an official appeal (and an administrative fee).
Backup your TMA at all times. Once you have uploaded your TMA (in Word document
format only), retain the Turnitin digital receipt as evidence of a successful submission. View
your submission to ensure that the entire document has been uploaded successfully.
SINGAPORE UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES (SUSS)
Page 2 of 5
SSC211e Tutor-Marked Assignment 02
July 2019 Semester
Plagiarism and Collusion
The assignment is to be completed on your own. You may discuss the TMA with your
course-mates; however, the assignment must be written independently. Do not share your
notes, draft or final TMA with anyone before the marked TMAs are returned to you.
Avoid plagiarism by giving yourself sufficient time to research and understand the material
so that you can write up your assignment in your own words. Quotations should be used
sparingly. Simply citing the source of ‘copied’ chunks of text does not excuse it from
plagiarism. Do ensure that any paraphrasing is done appropriately, even if you use text from
your own work that you have submitted as part of another assignment for the same or another
course.
The University takes a very serious view of plagiarism (passing off someone else’s ideas as
your own, or recycling of contents from your own earlier marked TMA from the same course
or another course) and collusion (submitting an assignment which is the same or very similar
to another student’s). Both are very serious academic offences. Please refer to the Student
Handbook on the penalties of plagiarism or collusion. You are strongly advised to submit
your TMA early, check the plagiarism report yourself, and if needed revise and resubmit your
TMA before the submission deadline.
SINGAPORE UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES (SUSS)
Page 3 of 5
SSC211e Tutor-Marked Assignment 02
July 2019 Semester
Question (100 marks)
The World Happiness Report is a publication that presents findings of an annual international
study on happiness. This study compares and ranks 156 countries according to the happiness
level of their peoples, on a yearly basis. Happiness level is scored from individuals’ personal
assessments of their lives. Attempt is thereafter made to explain the happiness level scored,
by relating it to six chosen variables: gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, social support,
healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity and absence of corruption.
Singapore fared quite well in this study, since its inception in 2012. She has been ranked the
happiest nation in Asia for 2012-2017 and second happiest nation in Asia for 2018-2019.
Below are the 2019 world rankings for selected countries, as concluded by this study.
Overall happiness level
Positive affect
Negative affect
GDP per capita
Social support
Healthy life expectancy
Freedom to make life choices
Generosity
Absence of corruption
Change in happiness level
from 2005-2008 to 2016-2018
Finland
1st
41st
10th
22nd
2nd
27th
5th
47th
4th
67th
(positive
change)
Taiwan
25th
17th
1st
N.A.
48th
N.A.
102th
56th
56th
29th
(positive
change)
Singapore
34th
38th
2nd
3rd
36th
1st
20th
21st
1st
109th
(negative
change)
Bhutan
95th
37th
98th
95th
68th
104th
59th
13th
25th
N.A.
The latest World Happiness Report 2019 is available at https://s3.amazonaws.com/happinessreport/2019/WHR19.pdf. Please evaluate Chapter 2 of the report (which covers research
methodology, world rankings and key findings of this study for year 2019) and address all the
following:
a)
Discuss reasons why it may be useful to study the topic of happiness via research.
(20 marks)
b)
Recognise and explain why this happiness study is deemed to have used nonexperimental research design, with evidence provided. In relation, suggest and
analyse possible operational and ethical considerations that would discourage the use
of experimental research design for this happiness study.
(50 marks)
c)
Appraise and justify whether measurements taken by this happiness study are
adequately valid and conclusions made by this happiness study are adequately robust.
Develop recommendations on how to further enhance the validity of measurements
and/or the robustness of conclusions for this happiness study, beyond the current level.
(30 marks)
SINGAPORE UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES (SUSS)
Page 4 of 5
SSC211e Tutor-Marked Assignment 02
July 2019 Semester
Student’s Notes

Review topics under Study Unit 1 Chapter 1 (Section 1.1 to 1.3), as well as Study
Unit 2 Chapter 3 (Sections 3.2 to 3.3) and Chapter 4 (Sections 4.1 to 4.3), before
attempting TMA02.

Apply relevant concepts covered by the course in a clear manner, during the
discussion for all parts of the question.

Additional research should be conducted beyond the reference of standard course
materials, in order to arrive at a more coherent and comprehensive answer. SAGE
Research Methods (an online database of readings and cases on research methods) is
one of the resources available at SUSS library, for your perusal where necessary.

Remember to explain and elaborate on your points. You should also illustrate your
points by using suitable examples or evidence, for all parts of the question.

It is compulsory to provide proper in-text citations and bibliographical references for
the assignment.

Recognise and appreciate the importance of academic integrity. Do not copy and
paste large blocks of text from any material in a wholesale manner, without adequate
paraphrasing. Quote short phrases (less than nine words) from materials, only when it
is impossible to paraphrase. There are past cases of SSC211e students having their
assignments flagged for plagiarism, due to indiscriminate copying and pasting.
Resources for Writing


Purdue
Online
Writing
Lab
(Purdue
OWL):
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/purdue_owl.html
APA
guide:
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/
apa_style_introduction.html
This TMA comprises 20% of the final mark for SSC211e Social Science Research Methods.
Your submissions will be marked holistically. The marks allocated for each part of the
question are a general guide to the relative importance of each part. Do note that up to 10% of
your grade may be deducted for poor language proficiency and/or incoherent structure and a
further 5% of your final grade will be deducted for exceeding the word limit. The word limit
for this TMA is 1,200 words, excluding bibliography. Please remember to provide the word
count, in-text citations as well as a list of references at the end of the essay.
Please upload this assignment to Turnitin by Monday, 26 August 2019, 11.55pm.
Resubmissions are allowed before this cut-off time.
— End of TMA —
SINGAPORE UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES (SUSS)
Page 5 of 5
Chapter 2
Changing World
Happiness
John F. Helliwell
Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British
Columbia, and Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
Haifang Huang
Associate Professor, Department of Economics,
University of Alberta
Shun Wang
Professor, KDI School of Public Policy and Management
The authors are grateful to the University of British Columbia, the Canadian
Institute for Advanced Research, the KDI School and the Ernesto Illy Foundation
for research support. We thank Gallup for access to and assistance with data from
the Gallup World Poll, and Matthew Ackman of the University of Alberta for his
help in collecting and interpreting data for various measures of the quality of
governance. Many thanks also for helpful advice and comments from Lara Aknin,
Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Jon Hall, Richard Layard, Max Norton, Hugh Shiplett,
and Meik Wiking.
10
11
Introduction
In the first World Happiness Report we surveyed
a wide range of available data. The Gallup World
Poll surveys covering 2005-2011 gave the widest
international coverage. Now, seven years later,
we have twice as many years of data from the
Gallup World Poll, giving us a sufficient time
span to consider how our principal measures of
happiness, and their main supporting factors,
have evolved from 2005 through 2018.
The chapter therefore starts with a presentation
of the evolution of annual data at the global and
regional levels for three key happiness measures
– life evaluations, positive affect, and negative
affect over the whole course of the Gallup World
Poll from 2005 through 2018. For all our plots of
annual data, we combine the surveys in 2005
and 2006, because of the small number of
countries in the first year.1
The title of this chapter is intentionally ambiguous,
designed to document not just the year-to-year
changes in happiness, but also to consider how
happiness has been affected by changes in the
quality of government. After our review of how
world happiness has been changing since the
start of the Gallup World Poll, we turn to present
our rankings and analysis of the 2016-2018
average data for our three measures of subjective
well-being plus the six main variables we use to
explain their international differences. See
Technical Box 1 for the precise definitions of all
nine variables.
For our country-by-country analysis of changes,
we report changes from 2005-2008 to 2016-2018,
grouping years together to provide samples of
sufficient size. We shall also provide estimates of
the extent to which each of the six key explanatory
variables contributed to the actual changes in life
evaluations from 2005-2008 to 2016-2018.
We then complete the chapter with our latest
evidence on the links between changes in the
quality of government, by a variety of measures,
and changes in national average life evaluations
over the 2005-2018 span of years covered by the
Gallup World Poll.
The Evolution of World Happiness
2005-2018
In recent previous reports, we presented bar
charts showing for the world as a whole, and for
each of 10 global regions, the distribution of
answers to the Cantril ladder question asking
respondents to value their lives today on a 0 to
10 scale, with the worst possible life as a 0 and
the best possible life as a 10. This gave us a
chance to compare happiness levels and inequality
in different parts of the world. Populationweighted average life evaluations differed
significantly among regions, being highest in
North America and Oceania, followed by Western
Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean,
Central and Eastern Europe, the Commonwealth
of Independent States, East Asia, Southeast Asia,
the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan
Africa and South Asia, in that order. We found
that well-being inequality, as measured by the
standard deviation of the distributions of individual
life evaluations, was lowest in Western Europe,
North America and Oceania, and South Asia; and
greatest in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa,
and the Middle East and North Africa.2
This year we shift our focus from the levels and
distribution of well-being to consider their
evolution over the years since the start of the
Gallup World Poll. We now have twice as many
years of coverage from the Gallup World Poll as
were available for the first World Happiness
Report in 2012. This gives us a better chance
to see emerging happiness trends from 2005
through 2018, and to investigate what may
have contributed to them.
First we shall show the population-weighted
trends3, based on annual samples for the world
as a whole, and for ten component regions, for
each of our three main happiness measures: life
evaluations, positive affect, and negative affect.
As described in Technical Box 1, the life evaluation
used is the Cantril Ladder, which asks survey
respondents to place the status of their lives on
a “ladder” scale ranging from 0 to 10, where 0
means the worst possible life and 10 the best
possible life. Positive affect comprises the
average frequency of happiness, laughter and
enjoyment on the previous day, and negative
affect comprises the average frequency of worry,
sadness and anger on the previous day. The
affect measures thus lie between 0 and 1.
12
13
World Happiness Report 2019
favoured the largest countries, as confirmed by
The three panels of Figure 2.1 show the global
the third line, which shows a population-weighted
and regional trajectories for life evaluations,
average for all countries in the world except the
positive affect, and negative affect. The whiskers
on the lines in all figures indicate 95% confidence five countries with the largest populations – China,
India, Indonesia, the United States and Russia.4
intervals for the estimated means. The first panel
shows the evolution of life evaluations measured
The individual trajectories for these largest
three different ways. Among the three lines, two
countries are shown in Figure 1 of Statistical
lines cover the whole world population, with one
Appendix 1, while their changes from 2005-2008
of the two weighting the country averages by
to 2016-2018 are shown later in this chapter, in
each country’s share of the world population,
Figure 2.8. Even with the largest countries
and the other being an unweighted average of
removed, the population-weighted average does
the individual national averages. The unweighted
not rise as fast as the unweighted average,
average is always above the weighted average,
suggesting that smaller countries have had
especially after 2015, when the weighted average greater happiness growth since 2015 than have
starts to drop significantly, while the unweighted
the larger countries.
average starts to rise equally sharply. This
suggests that the recent
trends
have not
Cantril
Ladder
Cantril Ladder
Positive Affect
5.7
5.7
5.6
5.6
5.5
5.5
Figure
2.1: World Dynamics of Happiness
5.4
5.4
5.3
.7
5.2
.6
5.1
5.3
5.7 5.7 5.7
5.2
5.65.1
5.6 5.6
.5
5.0
.4
5.55.0
5.5 5.5
.3
5.3 5.3 5.3
.2
5.2 5.2 5.2
.1
5.1 5.1 5.1
.0
5.0 5.0 5.0
0.78
0.76
0.74
Cantril
Positive
Positive
Affect
Affect Ladder
Positive Af
Cantril Ladder
0.78
0.76
0.74
Positive Affect
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
5.4 5.4 5.4
0.72
0.780.78
0.78
0.70
0.760.76
0.76
0.68
0.740.74
0.74
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
Cantril
Cantril
Ladder
Ladder
0.72
0.720.72
0.72
Popupation weighted
Population
Population
weighted
weighted
Non‐population
Non‐population
weighted
weighted
2018
2006
2006
2007
2007
2006
2008
2008
2007
2009
2009
2008
2010
2010
2009
2011
2011
2010
2012
2012
2011
2013
2013
2012
2014
2014
2013
2015
2015
2014
2016
2016
2015
2017
2017
2016
2018
2018
2017
2018
2018
2016
2017
2018
2006
2007
2006
2006
2008
2007
2007
2009
2008
2008
2010
2009
2009
2011
2010
2010
2012
2011
2011
2013
2012
2012
2014
2013
2013
2015
2014
2014
2016
2015
2015
2017
2016
2016
2018
2017
2017
2006
2007
2008
20092006
20102007
2008
2011
2009
20122010
20132011
Non‐population weighted
0.70
0.700.70
0.70
Population
Population
weighted (excluding top 5 weighted (excluding top 5
largest
largest
countries)
countries)
0.68
0.680.68
0.68
Popupation w
Popupation
weighted
weighted
Population
Population
weighted
Population
weighted
weighted
Negative
Affect
Negative Popupation
Affect
Negative Affect
Non‐population
Non‐population
weighted
Non‐populatio
weighted
0.32
0.32 0.32
g top 5 Population
Population
weighted (exc
Population
weighted
weighted
(excluding
(excluding
top 5top 5
0.30
0.30 0.30
largest countries)
largest
largest
countries)
countries)
0.28
0.28 0.28Non‐population
Non‐population
Non‐population
weighted
weighted
0.26
0.26 0.26
weighte
Negative
Negative
Negative
Affect
Affect
Affec
0.24
.320.320.24
0.320.24
0.22
0.22
.300.300.300.22
 Population weighted
0.20
0.20
.280.280.280.20
0.18
0.18
.260.260.26
 Non-population weighted
2018
2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
2011
2012
2010
2009
2007
2008
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
.240.240.24
.220.220.22
.200.200.20
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2006
 Population

weighted (excluding top 5 largest countries)
Popupation weighted
Popupation weighted
Non‐population weighted
Non‐population weighted
The second panel of Figure 2.1 shows positive
affect over the same period as used in the first
panel. There is no significant trend in either the
weighted or unweighted series. The populationweighted series show slightly but significantly
more positive affect than does the unweighted
series, showing that positive affect is on average
higher in the larger countries.
with about 80% of its population in the United
States. The weighted average, heavily influenced
by the U.S. experience, has fallen more than 0.4
points from its pre-crisis peak to 2018, about on
a par with Western Europe. The lower line shows
that average happiness in Latin America and the
Caribbean rose without much pause until a peak
in 2013, with a continuing decline since then.
The third panel of Figure 2.1 shows negative
affect, which follows a quite different path from
positive affect. The population-weighted world
frequency of negative affect in 2005-2006 is
about one-third of the frequency of positive
affect. Negative affect is lower for the weighted
series, just as positive affect is greater. Both the
weighted and unweighted series show significant
upward trends in negative affect starting in 2010
or 2011. The global weighted measure of negative
affect rises by more than one-quarter from 2010
to 2018, from a frequency of 22% to 28%. This
global total, striking as it is, masks a great deal of
difference among global regions, as will be
shown later in Figure 2.4.
The third panel shows quite different evolutions
of life evaluations in the three parts of Asia, with
South Asia showing a drop of a full point, from
5.1 to 4.1 on the 0 …
Purchase answer to see full
attachment