The World Database of Happiness

Ever wonder if everyone else in the world is as happy (or unhappy) as you are? Now you can find out from the World Database of Happiness at http://www.eur.nl/fsw/research/happiness/ . Though I wouldn't refer to this site for recent information (it apparently hasn't been updated in over a year) there's a fascinatin' collection of material here.

There are actually several components to this site. There's a bibliography of over 3400 articles on aspects of happiness, searchable by subject or author. The subjects are broken down amazingly; the concepts of happiness study breaks down to common and scientific language subtopics, problems of conceptualization, etc. Most of the articles I saw were in English though there were some in German and at least one Spanish publication.

There's a catalog of happiness queries, 522 variants for measuring happiness (broken down by focus.) There's a catalog of happiness in nations, encompassing almost 1900 surveys in 112 nations between 1946-2000. You can browse this by nation or by query type; I found the browsing by nation to be a little easier. (This site gets very frame-intense; the more monitor space you have the better.)

If you're looking for other general happiness information there's a catalog of "Results of empirical research on factors that go together with subjective appreciation of life." There are over 7000 findings from over 600 studies, searchable by keyword. Be sure to use the "How to Search" button, because your keyword search is somewhat limited. Finally, there's a "Directory of Happiness Investigators," covering over 5800 people. Worth a look.

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