We start to explore the major data using Tableau to help us answer our research questions.
How does the happiness score change from 2015 to 2020？
Observing this dynamic visualization, we can see how the happiness score changes in the six years from 2015 to 2020. The colours range from red, yellow, to blue for the below graph. Dark red indicates the happiest countries and dark blue indicates the opposite. For further exploration, we are interested in has there been any change in the top ten countries in the happiness index between 2015 and 2020? Top 20?
The outlier of each region
The colours range from red, yellow, to green. Dark red indicates the least happy countries and dark green indicates the happiest countries. Based on this visualization, we see that most Western countries are happier than Middle Eastern countries. However, there are a few exceptions such as Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, and Suriname.
Furthermore, some countries in Southeast Asia report high happiness scores such as Thailand coloured in dark green as well as South Korea, Japan, and Malaysia coloured in a lighter dark green. Hence it would be interesting to dig deeper into the aforementioned countries (e.g., Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Tobago, Suriname, South Korea, Japan, and Malaysia) to explore what potential factors that could explain reported low and high scores.
Exploration about Freedom Factor
Now we look at the freedom factor in particular. The below visualization is ordered by freedom scores with Uzbekistan experiencing the most freedom on the top left in light green and countries experiencing the least freedom on the bottom right. Similar to the above visualization, dark green depicts the happiest countries and dark red depicts the unhappiest countries. Based on this visualization, we can immediately conclude that freedom is not synonymous with happiness; however, does help. Furthermore, Cambodia is an interesting case in that it is ranked second as the country experiencing the most freedom but is only moderately happy. Freedom is only one factor.
Contribution of each factor
We further explore how these factors overall contribute to happiness from 2015 to 2020 in general, where we accumulated the index of each factor from the main dataset for each year. Based on the visualization below, we see the highest contribution is GDP, followed by health expectancy, freedom, generosity, and perception of corruption. We also see that there are fluctuations across interested years and GDP is obviously a major factor in explaining happiness scores. While the perception of corruption received the lowest score out of the five factors displayed, it would be interesting to see if this particular factor is significant — to what extent does corruption contribute to a country’s happiness and can citizens who live in corrupted countries be happy?
Conclusion
We hoped to answer some of our initial research questions upon data exploration, however, it seems not enough. We would like to further explore our data set with other data visualization tools.
