Writing our Way to Happiness - TaLeeza Earls

Writing Our Way to Happiness

In my Writ 1133-61 Writing and Research class, the big idea is “the pursuit of happiness”. During a six week experiment, we were given the task of keeping a mood log that tracked our daily happiness levels. Every day for six weeks, we recorded our mood three times a day based on a scale of 1-10. Half-way through the six-week period, we were given the opportunity to choose from a number of activities to examine how they would influence our overall happiness levels. In total, seven students, including myself, chose to create gratitude and reflection journals. Every night for three weeks we wrote about things we were most grateful for throughout the day and reflected on events that occurred throughout the day that had an effect on our overall happiness levels.

Our Results Showed…

There was little evidence to conclude that journaling every night for three weeks had a positive impact on the overall happiness levels of the seven participants. The participants generally chose to journal every night during the three weeks. The first graph displays the combined results of the happiness levels of the seven participants. Over the six week period, the happiness levels of the seven participants was around a level six. The second graph displays the change in nighttime happiness levels from the first three weeks to the last three weeks when the participants journaled. Although there was a slight increase in the overall happiness levels, there was not enough to conclude that journaling was the cause of this increase. This negates the hypothesis that journaling every night for three weeks would increase the overall happiness levels of the seven participants.

3 Ways to Conduct a Better Experiment

Our class experiment fell victim to many limitations. Our population size was very limited due to the number of overall participants in our study. We also did not conduct the experiment over a long enough period of time. This prevented us from receiving a large sample of data. We also did not set a control in our experiment. The participants were able to journal at any time throughout the day. They also determined their daily mood levels based on an open-ended mood scale. When participants are given the opportunity to self-report they can interpret the information differently from another participant. As a result, what one participant might consider to be a level 5 could be different from what another participant would consider to be a level 5.

In order to conduct a better experiment, follow these three simple steps:

Increase the Population Size: Conducting an experiment on a smaller population limits the amount of data that can be collected and analyzed. By increasing the number of participants in a study, researchers can interpret a greater sample of data that will support their hypothesis, provide more accurate results, and answer any further research questions.

   Conduct the Experiment Over a Longer Period of Time: In order to obtain the most accurate results, it is crucial to conduct an experiment over a longer period time. It can be difficult to conclude how an variable is affected if it was not given enough time to produce a change. Without having enough time to collect accurate data that will produce accurate results, the experiment can be useless.

Set a Control: Controlling one or more variable within an experiment will produce more accurate results. If all participants follow the same criteria, there will be less room for the manipulation of the results due to outside variables. Something as simple as setting a specific time to collect data or creating a universal scale for participants to use will allow for a less open-ended interpretation of what is required of the participants and produce more reliable data.

Pursuing Passions to Increase Happiness - Aaron Nitschke

Experimenting with Happiness

This experiment included 8 students were recruited to partake in a happiness experiment for their writing class at the University of Denver. I was one of these unfortunate souls who had to attempt to increase his overall happiness. We had to take time out of our precious week to follow an activity that could be defined as our “passion” or an activity that we love to do similar to a hobby. As experiments go this was one of the greatest that I have ever done. I was essentially doing my homework while procrastinating this itself increased my happiness.

The specific parameters of the experiment were that all 8 participants were required to do the activity for 3 days a week for at least a half an hour. We were given 6 week period to record daily happiness on a scale from 1 to 10. Three of those six weeks were when we had to collect our data. After the six week period we had to compile our data and see if there was any possible correlation between pursuing our passions and an increase in our overall happiness.

The Results of the Data  

The data that appeared from the experiment was quite interesting. When I entered into this experiment I expected that our passions would help our weekly happiness. It would make sense right? Doing the things we love generally should make us happier. However, this was not the case from the results that I saw. In general happiness stayed the same or dropped across the entire study group. The average happiness for the first three weeks of study was around 5.971 whereas the last three weeks during the actual experiment they average was 5.987.  There was only a .016 point change in the happiness levels. This was not nearly enough change to indicate a correlation between our passions and our overall level of happiness. 

The data collected for this experiment was almost entirely quantitative since all that people recorded were numbers. The first two numbers that I stated above were the average level of happiness across the three week periods. To get a broader look at the data I also calculated the averages using the data from all 8 participants and compiled them into a graph. This graph displays the data based on time of day.  

Notice that overall happiness levels were generally lower in the 4- 6 week time interval. The trend I find interesting is that the only time happiness was higher from week 4-6 was in the morning. It is unfortunately difficult to explain this strange spike at the beginning.

Reasons, Conclusions, and Some Insight

Upon further reflection I eventually came to the conclusion that our overall happiness is affect by multiple factors. This became evident when I noticed that during the last 3 weeks of the mood record time interval, most people’s midterms were occurring during this time period. This most likely decreased the overall mood of many if not all of the participants in the study. Furthermore, in the case of some participants, personal issue also decreased their happiness. Based on these observations I determined that since our overall happiness is affect by multiple factors, it is nearly impossible to isolate one of these factors and see if it increases or decreases happiness. It is a possibility that pursuing our passions did prevent our happiness levels from dropping lower but again it is impossible to tell if they actually did or not.

My Opinions and Experience

Despite all of my optimism, my expectations were wrong. The thing that I found strange was that when I was pursuing my passion I generally felt happy. For my experiment I went and did archery for an hour or so. Even if I arrived angry or upset over something the activity calmed me down and made me happier. However, the level of happiness was rather fleeting in hind sight. During archery I did not think of school or my personal problems but the minute I left for home all my troubles seemed to rush back at me in a most dissatisfying fashion. I think the key is that our passions make us happy while we do them. They provide us a time where we can simply do an activity that we care about and find fun which is relaxing and happy. However, when it is all over the rest of the world appears again.

Do Your Favorite Pastimes Really Make You Happy? - Tucker Vann

Post 1 - 5/6/15 

For starters, here’s a brief list of things that I would consider hobbies and that I think make me happy.

• Snowboarding
• Foosball
• Football
• Working out
• Baseball
• Trap Shooting

These are all physical things yes, but they certainly do not have to be. People may enjoy star gazing, or reading books. The fact of the matter is that people like to partake in things that make them happy. Duh. A recent study at the University of Denver may change your mind. This is an activity log created by a student.

Activity Log

Monday, April 13th – Played football for one hour

Wednesday, April 15th – Played football for one hour

Monday, April 20th – Played football for one hour

Wednesday, April 22nd – Played football for one hour

Monday April 27th – Played football for one hour

Wednesday April 29th – Played football for one hour

Post 2 - 5/8/15

Students at the University compiled over six weeks’ worth of data based on their personal happiness. They were instructed to keep detailed logs of their daily activities, especially the particular ones that had significant effects on their happiness. On a scale of 1-10 they kept record of themselves, three times a day for six weeks. Here is an example of one student’s first week.

23-Mar	6	7	6	6.33	First Day of Classes/Baseball Control
24-Mar	5	6	8	6.33	8am Lab/1 more class, content/Country Music
25-Mar	3	3	7	4.33	Not Prepared for Snow/Impending HW/Hitting
26-Mar	6	6	8	6.67	ALMOST FRIDAY!!!
27-Mar	7	7	7	7.00	Friday, baseball games tomorrow
28-Mar	8	8	9	8.33	Mom came, baseball games, Star thing
29-Mar	6	5	4	5.00	We lost, Hockey lost, tomorrow's Monday

They also averaged the totals of the three times of the day to see if that could possibly have any affect.  The averages revealed on what particular day the subjects tended to be happiest. How well would your average day compare?

Post 3 - 5/10/15 

The results of each individual were categorized into a series of averages including time of day over the first three and last three weeks, by day, by week, and overall. They were compiled into summary charts and were shared between the students. For example,

Mood Data Summary
	Mean Score	Standard Deviation	Range
Weeks 1-3	6.35	1.855	2-10
Weeks 4-6	6.89	1.533	4-10
Total	6.62	1.715	2-10

Weekly Mood Averages

Week 1	Week 2	Week 3	Week 4	Week 5	Week 6
6.29	6.95	5.81	6.67	6.71	7.29

Daily Mood Averages

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
Weeks 1-3	6.33	5.67	5.78	7.44	8.33	6.56	4.33
Weeks 4-6	6.67	6.89	7.56	6.33	7.11	7.67	6.00
Total	6.5	6.28	6.67	6.89	7.72	7.11	5.17

Time of Day Mood Averages

	Morning	Afternoon	Evening/Night
Weeks 1-3	6.19	6.43	6.43
Weeks 4-6	6.52	6.71	7.43
Total	6.36	6.57	6.93

By using these charts, the students were able to collaborate with all of the same data to draw their own conclusions on what made people happiest.

Post 4 - 5/12/15

The results of this experiment showed that adding an extra activity in each week did little to increase people’s overall happiness. The difference between doing the activity and not doing it was less than 1%. This small of a margin could be a result of too small of a data range with respect to time. The experiment was only done over a six week period. If done over a longer period say six months to a year, the results could have varied significantly. A likely reason for this is that during the DU experiment, if something major happened in someone’s life, it would affect them for more of the data range.

Another possibility for the insignificant margin is that the drag of an average college school day masked anything gained from hobbies. Most of the tests were done during the school week which means that students were under the most stress at this time. The hobbies may have even taken away from time that would otherwise be spent on schoolwork, leading to an increase in stress. This has the exact opposite effect of what was designed.

Is it plausible that our favorite pastimes may not contribute to overall happiness?