![]() Which of those things, you wonder, cause happiness? How would your alien-self get started on this big question.Īs a person who has happiness, you might already have some hunches about what causes changes in happiness. You also discover that planet earth has lots of other things. You arrived on earth and heard about this thing called happiness that people have. A causal theory and understanding of happiness could be used for all of those things. If you knew the causes of happiness what could you do? How about increase your own happiness or, help people who are unhappy or, better appreciate why Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh is unhappy or, present valid scientific arguments that argue against incorrect claims about what causes happiness. For example, what causes happiness to go up or down. OK then, after we have measured some happiness, I bet you can think of some more pressing questions. For now, though, we will side-step those very important questions, and assume that, happiness is a thing, and our measure of happiness measures something about how happy people are. For example, if you force people to give a number between 0-100 to rate their happiness, does this number truly reflect how happy that person is? Can a person know how happy they are? Does the question format bias how they give their answer? Is happiness even a real thing? These are all good questions about the validity of the construct (happiness itself) and the measure (numbers) you are using to quantify it. “Great, thanks Captain Obvious”.īefore moving on, you should also be skeptical of what the numbers might mean. You’ve probably met some of those of really happy people, and really unhappy people, and you yourself probably have some amount of happiness. There are different people, and different people are different amounts of happy. ![]() We would expect those numbers tell us some things we already know. ![]() What kind of questions can you ask about those numbers? Well, you can look at the numbers and estimate their general properties as we already did. What do you get when you ask people to use a number to describe how happy they are? A bunch of numbers. Let’s continue with this imaginary thought experiment. We started Chapter two with some fake data on human happiness, remember? We imagined that we asked a bunch of people to tell us how happy they were, then we looked at the numbers they gave us. ![]() If you are looking for a big theme to think about while you take this course, the theme is: how do we ask and answer questions using data?įor every section in this book, you should be connecting your inner monologue to this question, and asking yourself: How does what I am learning about help me answer questions with data? Advance warning: we know it is easy to forget this stuff when we dive into the details, and we will try to throw you a rope to help you out along the way…remember, we’re trying to answer questions with data. ![]() The big reason is that we are interested in getting answers to questions using data. Let’s not forget the big reason why we learned about descriptive statistics. So, we talked about how to look at the data visually using plots and histograms, and we talked about how to summarize lots of numbers so we could determine their central tendencies (sameness) and variability (differentness). It was too much too look at and it didn’t make sense. Correlation does not equal causation -Every Statistics and Research Methods Instructor Ever ![]()
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