Article Analysis and Research on Marriage

All research presented in this paper will have been extracted from the HINTS dataset. The researchers who studying this dataset I will be using gathered the dataset through surveys of questionnaires. The two variables used in this paper will be “What is your marital status? Would you say…” and “During the past 30 days, how often did you feel so sad that nothing could cheer you up?” I picked these two variable because as a sociology major, I am very interested in how society as a whole works, living in a society where marriage is encouraged and staying single is looked-down upon, I wanted to research if there really was any correlation between the happiness level a person experiences if they are married versus when a person is single. The variables that were selected after being operationalized are very important. This means that the variables where gathered in a matter where the question was stated in a manner that it did not have a double meaning or that it could not be misunderstood. In other words, the variables had simple answers, given in the form of a scale and a list of statuses. The possible answers for the marital status question were,” Married. Living as married. Divorced. Widowed. Separated. Single, never married. Not ascertained. Refuse. Don’t know.” The possible answers for the how sad are you question would be, “All the time. Most of the time. Some of the time. A little of the time. None of the time. Refuse. Don’t know.”

It is often asked what makes a person happy. Many people would like to know the secret to a happy life, the answer may be marriage. I would like to research the correlation between how happy a married person is as opposed to how happy an unmarried person is. The data set I will be using for this ...

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...hould always be aware of is that people lie. Some of the respondents could have just lied about the level of happiness they experienced because if they told the truth they might feel guilty. One easy fix to this problem would be to administer the survey in a private setting and not over the phone where the wife or husband could be within ear shot.one more thing to be thought about is that if society’s concept of marriage changes, would these finding change as well? Only time can tell!

Reference

Diener, E., & Diener, C. (1996). Most people are happy. Psychological science,7(3), 181-185.

Glenn, N. D. (1975). The contribution of marriage to the psychological well-being of males and females. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 594-600.

Ross, C. E. (1995). Reconceptualizing marital status as a continuum of social attachment. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 129-140