Story

So I figured it would be interesting to show the conclusion in the beginning, just to give an overview. It is way too much to go into detail on, I'll do that by continent further down in this post, however it is interesting to see the relationship between internet usage and happiness. This graph is by country, and at first glance there seems to be somewhat of a correlation between the ranking (with exceptions). It will be interesting to see more intro detail when I go by continent. 

Here is a picture providing a visualization of the bars. When looking at the map there are several similarities, the countries ranking high for internet usage usually ranks high for happiness, and the other way around. From first glance I see this especially in many parts of Europe and Africa.

Now let's get into the continents:

Here we see the bar for Africa, and as you can see the rankings start high. This is something I have explained in my post discussing the data, but I will summarize this point by saying that some parts of Africa are underdeveloped and there are not only a lack of internet but a lack of happiness as life is rough. Now with that being said, I see a lot of correlation between the measurements! Do you? The Central African Republic is actually on the same rank for both internet use and happiness - how interesting! There are not many countries that surprise me by being different, if anything it's only Libya and Mauritius that clearly ranks a little bit better on happiness than they rank on internet, and Botswana and Egypt that does the opposite. 

Now to the visualization of the data from Africa. As interesting as I found the bars to be, the map does not look completely identical. I see a lot of similarities, in for example Mauritania, Algeria, Mozambique, and Madagascar. Notice the filter for the maps, the rank for happiness begins at 56 and the rank for internet begins at 72 - they both end at 153 which is the number of countries participating in my dataset (see my post on the description of my data for why).

For the continents of South and North America I decided to just combine them into one, Americas, due to lack of data for some countries. Look at the difference between Canada and Haiti, two very different countries and my story shows just how severely they differ. It is horrible to see that Haiti scores lower than anyone else on their continent in both internet usage and happiness, and my dataset clearly shows that life is very difficult there. I would also like you to remember the bars from Africa, how almost every country was at nearly 50-50, now look at the data from America! Here it is more of an exception to have similar scores for both. Look to Costa Rica, Canada, Mexico, Nicaragua (etc...); they score so much higher for happiness than internet! This is something I would like to take notice of and see if repeats itself on other continents... 

Canada, Chile, and Haiti are what I notice to do similar for both on the visualization of the map (feel free to go to the post with the link to my Tableau to get a better look at the island nations). 

For Asia I feel like it's almost a combination of the results we got from Africa and America. I see a lot of countries where it is somewhat equal correlation between the measurements, as well as I see countries with an uneven result. Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Laos, Kyrgyzstan and Turkey (too mention a few) have very similar levels, while UAE, Qatar, Kuwait (!!!!!!), South Korea and Hong Kong (too mention a few) have very uneven levels. Especially look at Kuwait, wow their internet usage is so high but happiness so low - interesting! 

While the highest global rank for happiness starts at 13 in Asia, the rank of internet starts at 2. This is very interesting to look at as it will give a skewed result from the beginning (as it did for other continents). I think the map is very interesting, because I see so many similarities in the map. It's almost like a 'find five things wrong picture'! The most noticeable to me is Mongolia, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Israel. I find this to be very interesting overall, because there are some countries that scored noticeably better in some measurements than in others (scored mostly way better in happiness than in internet usage).

While Oceania consists of 14 countries, I could only find sustainable data for New Zealand and Australia. This is something else I'll talk about in detail in my post explaining my data, but obviously still had to mention here. While my dataset for this continent provides a poor representation of the truth, I still felt like including what I could find. It can be summarized as easy as that New Zealand scores noticeably higher on both internet rank and happiness rank. 

There's really nothing else to state about the map, as the bar does all the talking. The colors are the same because New Zealand does better in both measurements. Boring, but it'll have to do.

Similar to the results from Asia, Europe provides us with very different results for the countries. Some countries are even (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Poland, Slovakia, Spain ...) and some countries are very uneven (Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Finland, Estonia). Especially look at Finland, how interesting! I wonder why they score so high in happiness yet so low in internet usage. This will be very interesting to include in my conclusion.

(Note: Somehow Kazakhstan made it into the map, this is an error)

Looking at the visualization is very interesting because I see many similarities. Especially focus on north-western Europe - the only differences I notice is in France and Spain! For Eastern Europe I see some differences, but I see some similarities as well. 

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I started this project thinking that a high internet usage is bad for us, not just for our everyday life and relationships but for our mental health as well. If you spend hours after hours every single day glued to a computer/smartphone, can you really be happy? Doesn't life happen out and about, and not on a screen? I initially thought that the countries ranking high for happiness ranked low for internet usage, so my research has left me rather surprised and questioning what I knew.

In Africa we saw a correlation between the measurements, then we saw lower ranks for internet in the American continents as well in Oceania, and a combination of both this in Asia and Europe. There were no clear links globally, and I just can't help but to find this so interesting! What did you think the answer would be, if I asked if you about correlation between internet usage and happiness - would you think one impacts the other? 

Mia Moen

Berkeley College '21