Objectives: In the human life, happiness and health are the essential elements to preserve the quality of life and well being. This study is a trial to assess the level of self-perceived happiness and to figure out the determining factors on the perso...
Objectives: In the human life, happiness and health are the essential elements to preserve the quality of life and well being. This study is a trial to assess the level of self-perceived happiness and to figure out the determining factors on the personal happiness.
Methods : A questionnaire study was conducted on the 1051 residents (men 501, women 550) who lived in Busan and Kyungsangnam-do area from March to July, 2004. The two types of measurement tool were used; the formula for happiness introduced by Rothwell and Cohen, and Korean Health Profile (KHP 1.0) that developed to measure the self-perceive health status of Koreans. The level of happiness was checked by the zero (absolutely not) to the tenth (always yes) scales on the four questions; Are you social, energetic and tolerable to change ? (P₁), Are you positive, well-recovered to fail and control your life ? (P₂), Are you full-filled the basic elements of life, like health, money, safety and freedom of choice ? (E), Do you have many neighborhood who would help you when needed, and do you hard work to achieve your goal ? (H) The happiness index calculated and presented as the score out of 100 by the formula P₁+P₂+(5×E)+(3×H). Data were analyzed by SPSS (ver10.0) and SAS program (version 9.1). Cronbach's alpha were 0.7893 and 0.7040 for the items of the happiness index and KHP 1.0, respectively.
Results: Mean age of the subjects was 42.0 years, and the prevalence of health behaviors as follows; current smoking 28.7%, current drinking 40.7%, regularly exercise 52.8%, regularly health check 57.6%, hold past history of disease 30.5%, and mean sleeping time 6.8 hours. The mean level of happiness index was 61.3, and mean level of the self-perceived general health 56.2 in total. The mean happiness index level was higher in women (62.7) than men (59.6) (p=0.002), in middle-high school level (59~60) than below elementary school (63.4) and above college (64.0) (p=0.002), in the higher socioeconomic (SES) group (p<0.001), in the non-smokers (p<0.001) and non-drinkers (p=0.035), in the regularly exercise group (p<0.001), in the breakfast eating group (p=0.003), in the regularly meal group (p<0.001), in the regularly health checked group (p=0.010), and in no past history of disease group (p=0.003), but had no difference with age group (p=0.151). In the Spearman correlation analysis, the happiness index had positive correlation with the general health status (r=0.341), however, had negative correlation with the social isolation (r=-0.414), emotional stress (r=-0.337), sleep disturbance (r=-0.266), emotional role limitation (r=-0.246), vitality disturbance (r=-0.246), pain (r=-0.221), physically malfunction (r=-0.215), physical role limitation (r=-0.189) (p<0.001). In the stepwise multiple regression analysis, the thirteen variables were included in the model with R²=0.3538, and the three factors had major role to determine the personal happiness with R²=0.3075; social isolation (R²=0.1836), SES (R²=0.0724), general health status (R²=0.0515).
Conclusions: Even though the limitation of references, incomplete understanding to the concept of each items consisting happiness index, small sample size, etc, this study showed some interesting results that social isolation, SES and general health status had major role to determine the personal happiness. This study has a meaning that a trial, and a propose the fundamental concept to the further study; for development of standardized and reliable measurement tool for the personal happiness.