I was inspired to start this project by my own personal feelings and observations during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Sudden increases in my life stressors, the constant onslaught of morbid news, drastic changes in lifestyle, etc. all lead to a decline in my mental health. However, I wasn’t alone in this struggle. I noticed that many of my peers and families struggled to adapt to a COVID-19 lifestyle, just as I did. As a result, I thought it would be important to use data to better understand the current state of mental health around the world during COVID-19. By potentially uncovering mental health trends, I could bring awareness to those issues and be a step closer to finding appropriate solutions. To my surprise, I learned that COVID-19, at least on paper hadn’t affected world happiness to the extent I thought it would. Though many countries got sadder, seemingly an equal amount got happier. It made me better understand the resilience and perseverance of individuals and countries around the world. This lack of extreme change to me showed that individuals are supporting one another through this trying time, and that though oftentimes things may seem incredibly bleak, things will get better.
I built my project using data from 2018-2021 world happiness reports, and manipulated and analyzed this data through testing environments such as jupyterlab and command prompt. I approached my project logically, and sought to better understand my data by visualizing the data and noting any observable differences between the years. Following this, I dove deeper into my data and attempted to determine how various factors affect the happiness score, and used this analysis to predict a projected happiness score in 2025. Though my projection analysis may not have been the most accurate, it demonstrated the unpredictability of the future. Challenges I faced were understanding and trying to predict trends and data in 2025 in order to predict a happiness score. It proved nearly impossible to yield a good fitting of my data, and established that much more testing and analysis is required to even come near calculating and understanding the future and what it holds.
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