The happiness question in the General Social Survey asks, “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” The dependent variable in the logit analyses that are presented in figures 15.6 and 15.7 used a binary variable in which 1 stood for responses of “very happy” and 0 stood for “pretty happy” or “not too happy.” The sample was limited to the GSS surveys from 1990 through 2010. The independent variables and their codings were as follows:
Age. Age in years.
Family. Since children don’t have much effect on happiness independently of marital status, and those who are unmarried have similar relationships to happiness whether they are never married or formerly married, the variable for family has just three values: (1) unmarried, (2) married and saying their marriage was “pretty happy” or “not too happy,” and (3) married and saying that their marriage was “very happy.”
Vocation. The main effect of vocation on happiness is satisfaction with the work one does. Working longer hours also has some independent relationship, but for presentational purposes I have ignored it. Analyses were originally conducted using four values of vocation: (1) dissatisfied with work, any number of hours and any kind of work; (2) moderately satisfied with work, any number of hours and any kind of work; (3) a woman who is very satisfied with being a full-time homemaker; and (4) very satisfied with work and working at paid employment, any number of hours and either sex. Discriminating between satisfied people in paid employment and satisfied homemakers did not add to the analysis, so categories (3) and (4) were collapsed for the analyses shown in the text.
Faith. This variable has three values, drawing on the categories used in chapter 11: (1) de facto seculars—those either with no religion or professing a religion but attending worship services no more than once a year; (2) believers who profess a religion and attend services at least several times a year but do not qualify for the third category; and (3) those who attend services at least nearly every week and say that they have a strong affiliation with their religion.
Community. Because of the GSS’s sparse data on measures of social and civic engagement during the 1990s and 2000s, we are restricted to an index of social trust, which sums the optimistic responses to the helpfulness, fairness, and trustworthiness questions discussed in chapter 14. The three items were coded so that the negative answer (e.g., “most people try to take advantage of you”) is scored as 0, the “it depends” answer is scored as 1, and the positive answer is scored as 2. The combined scores formed an index with a minimum score of 0 and a maximum score of 6. The three categories used in the analysis were low social trust (0–2), moderate social trust (3–4), and high social trust (5–6).
The presentation in the text summarizes logit analyses that explored all the permutations of interactions among these four independent variables.