Two Sides of the Same Coin or Two Different Currencies? Representations of Happiness and Unhappiness among Finnish Women
- PDF / 906,148 Bytes
- 25 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 8 Downloads / 180 Views
Open Access
Two Sides of the Same Coin or Two Different Currencies? Representations of Happiness and Unhappiness among Finnish Women Jennifer De Paola 1 Josetta Lehtonen 1
& Wolfgang
Wagner 2 & Anna-Maija Pirttilä-Backman 1
&
Accepted: 28 September 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This paper presents results from a study exploring representations of “happiness” and “unhappiness.” Word associations with these concepts were produced by 16–18 and 29– 34-year-old women from Finland, the country that the United Nation’s World Happiness Report has ranked the “happiest” in the world. Correspondence Analysis (CA) and Hierarchical Cluster Analysis show that participants in both age groups share three clusters of words associated with “happiness”: Tangible happiness, Affective happiness and Serene happiness. We noted more differences in the associations with “unhappiness,” for which the two groups share only two clusters: Loss and Everyday problems. A distinct third cluster, Affective unhappiness, emerged for the younger women, whereas older women’s associations are further differentiated into a more complex structure, including two more clusters: Dejection and Apprehension. Additionally, CA shows that in both age groups, self-reported happiness levels do not discriminate which words are associated with happiness and unhappiness. Finally, qualitative content analysis of a questionnaire item investigating how to reach complete happiness suggested that there are three recurring answer types: happiness can be improved through external changes, internal changes, or not at all because complete/permanent happiness does not exist. The study provides a methodological design which, unlike most happiness studies, allows participants the freedom to bring up the meaning of happiness and unhappiness. Thus, the study constitutes a contribution to a more nuanced understanding of happiness. Keywords Happiness . Unhappiness . Social representations . Word associations . Women
* Jennifer De Paola [email protected]
1
Faculty of Social Sciences, Social Psychology, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 54, 00014 Helsinki, Finland
2
University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia
Integr Psych Behav
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina Against stereotypical expectations of Finns as emotionally introverted people dealing with long and dark winters brought by the boreal climate, for the past three years the World Happiness Report (WHR) has ranked Finland as the happiest country in the world (Sachs et al. 2018; Helliwell et al. 2019, 2020). When asked how it feels to live in the “happiest country in the world,” an 18-year-old Finnish girl mused: “kind of a joke if you think about the grey weather and the people taking the stairs to avoid talking to their neighbor, but makes sense when you think about our social welfare really working and things like free education.” With her brief answer, this young Finnish woman acknowledged the multifaceted nature of happiness, venturi
Data Loading...
