A finger on the pulse of happiness in an urbanised island context

Abstract

Two questions, twenty four hours, three hundred and sixty comments, a handful of insights and one conclusion that echoes the results of several scholarly research studies: environmental quality matters to well-being in the highly urbanised context of Malta.

The exercise was intended to stimulate some ideas for a future study and not intended as scientific research in itself. I simply posted a question in social media as follows: “Think of your typical day. What instances reduce your well-being?”. I received dozens and dozens of comments, almost all from people in Malta. I coded the comments and aggregated them. The day after, I tried it a different way. I asked “Think of your typical day. What instances improve your well-being? Again, dozens of comments which I coded and aggregated. On both occasions I asked my followers to “think of your answer before reading others” although I cannot exclude that some social influence could have occurred.

Within the limitations of an obviously skewed sample (limited to people who are active on social media, literate, understand English), and of some plausible self-censorship by contributors who may have limited themselves to issues they felt they could talk of publicly, a handful of fairly clear insights emerged. The exact phrases that people came up with were fed into a word map generator.