Study of Happiness Rate and Life Satisfaction in Malaysia

The environment where a person lives has a significant impact on his or her development. The present study reports results of the study on happiness rating and life satisfaction among Malaysian household. The data were gotten from a Selangor and Klang Valley states study based on a representative sample in the Malaysia. The objective of the study is to determine the happiness rate and life satisfaction in Malaysia. Data was collected through interview using a set of questionnaire and analyzed using the SPSS program. The results of the study showed that in terms of happy rate, most aspects contribute to the human happiness such as life good health. Consequently, the important issue for a happy family is good health. The model results show that relationship the main influences on happiness of life are divided in two groups, namely, positive and negative with 0.44 and 0.34 coefficients, respectively.


INTRODUCTION
During the past 20 years, numerous scholars the interaction between social sciences and environmental planning have proposed that measurements of environmental quality should include both objective measures of environmental phenomena and subjective measures of human responses to them (Bonaito et al., 2006).Furthermore, scholars have suggested that such study can occur within the context of Quality of Life (QOL) research (Fahy and Cinneide, 2008).
Recently, QOL issues have increasingly been a focus in cities especially newly industrializing and developing countries.Pioneering studies in this field were conducted by researchers in western nations (Foo, 2000) who came from numerous disciplines such as planning, architecture, sociology and psychology.During recent decades QOL studies have been a growth area in the developed world.Meanwhile, documented research on QOL in the Asian region has been scarce and infrequent (Lee, 2008).
Many studies have shown that health conditions, quality of marriage and family life are important determinants of QOL (Burman and Margolin, 1992;Shek, 1995;Walker et al., 1990).Satisfaction with marriage is a crucial source of physical, mental and social well-being in both spouses and children (Bookwala, 2011;Proulx et al., 2007;Holt-Lunstad et al., 2008;Le Poire, 2005).Marital satisfaction was defined as individuals' global subjective evaluation of the quality of their marriage (Li and Fung, 2011).Also Anderson et al. (1983) defined marital satisfaction as subjective feelings of happiness, satisfaction and pleasure experienced by spouses considering all aspects of their life.
Some studies in the general population in the USA (Cherepanov et al., 2010), Norway (Hjermstad et al., 1998) and Iran (Montazeri et al., 2005) have showed that health-related QOL is lower in women than in men.Furthermore, gender has been often used as an important factor to explain the higher level of marital satisfaction in men compared to women (Fowers, 1991;Shek, 1995);and Proulx et al. (2007) concluded that marital satisfaction is positively associated with life satisfaction in women (Freudiger, 1983) as well as with physical and mental health in both spouses (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2008;Le Poire, 2005), based on findings from several investigations.
Furthermore, the results of longitudinal and crosssectional studies provided evidence that marital dissatisfaction is likely to lead to a high risk of depression because of high marital stress, negative communication, low spousal support, or low couple cohesion (Beach et al., 2003;Karney, 2001;Proulx et al., 2007).In this study we studied happiness rate and life satisfaction in Malaysia.The objective of the study is to determine the happiness rate and life satisfaction in Malaysia.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
This section presents the research approach used in this study, sample selection methods, data collection methods and method of data analysis.This study employed a correspondent design and using the survey method procedure to get a sample.
Respondents: Target respondent is a Malaysian household that is in the range of age between 15 and 60, living in Selangor state and Kuala Lumpur and has the experience of using public bus transport.The ages range 15 to 60 years old chosen because people in these age have a routine commute travel behavior and probably has taken public bus transport as their mode of choice.From the age of 15, the children usually have to go to school that is not in their own neighborhood.After the age of 60, people usually may not have routine commuter behavior because they already pension.The total number of 767 respondents was randomly selected and completed questionnaire.
Questionnaire/instrument: The questionnaire was divided into three parts: demographics, the items consist of a correspondent to the city they live, age, sex, driving license, happiness; and, public amenities and physical surroundings.Respondents were asked to rate 1 to 6 where 1 has a low rate and 6 have a high rate.Likert-type scale rate ranged from strongly disagree, moderately disagree, disagree, agree, moderately agree and strongly agree.
Procedure: Self-rating and handing out questionnaires were used as a data collection method in this study.
Reasons of using three sections questionnaire to collect data are: • The respondent has break time when fill out the questionnaire in order to understand the aim of each section questionnaire • Questionnaire offers confidentiality The respondents were asked to fill out the questionnaire at the street or at their convenient time.

DATA ANALYSIS AND RESULTS
As mentioned earlier, the aim of this study is to study of happiness rate and life satisfaction in Malaysia.SPSS software was used for data input and analysis.Data Analysis was conducted in fourth steps; first, frequency analysis was undertaken to highlight the most responder's choices.Second, correlation analysis was undertaken to measure linear correlation between variables.Then factor analysis was performed with the aim to identify groups or cluster of variables.Fourth, a regression analysis was performed to evaluate the contribution of each factor on overall satisfaction.
Table 1 shows the descriptive analysis of the different aspects contributes towards happiness where Fig. 1 shows the frequencies of happiness mean.
According to Table 1 and Fig. 1, health has the highest rating for the individual happiness where political stability has the lowest rating for the individual happiness.Table 2 shows the descriptive analysis of the different components for a happy family where Fig. 2 shows the frequencies of happy family mean.
According to Table 2 and Fig. 2, happy family 3 (good health) and happy family 15 (possess luxurious The correlation is one of the most common and most useful statistics.A correlation is a single number that describes the degree of relationship between two variables.The correlation matrix computes the correlation coefficients of the columns of a matrix through indicating maximum and minimum coefficients.Table 3 shows the correlation matrix of happiness. Table 4 shows the KMO and Bartlett's test analysis for the constructs in the proposed model.The analysis found that the Measurement of Sample Adequency (MSA) KMO is 0.849 more than 0.5 (minimum value) and that the survey data suitable for analysis of Principal Component Analysis (PCA).Similarly, Bartlett Sphericity test values were significant (p<0.001),suggesting that the variables are closely related to each other and suitable for further analysis.Analysis of the suitability of the measurement matrix    revealed that all the items in the MSA meet the compatibility matrix (>0.5) and so is all the commonality in the range 0.4 to 0.7.The Principal Component Analysis (PCA), the values of the scale (loading), eigenvalues and percentage changes shown in Table 5. Varimax rotation methods were performed to produce the maximum value of the scale factor.The result shows that two factors included positive and negative happiness were produced and the value of each item exceeds the value 0.4.While the eigenvalues of these two factors are 5.76 and 2.90, respectively, with 29.87% of the total variability that can be explained.Meanwhile, the scree plot in Fig. 3 also shows that there are three components that have eigenvalues ≥1.0.Group 1 is included positive happiness and group 2 is included negative happiness.
Based on analysis of PCA we have found two different groups included positive happiness and negative happiness.The next analysis is to predict what the main factor is contributing to happiness and life satisfaction.In this study multiple regression analysis was performed to asses the contribution variable for the preference model for the happiness.Table 6 shows the ANOVA summary table or analysis of variance of the dependent variable and independent variable of happiness model.The analysis found that the F-test show that there is a significant relationship (p = 0.000) between the dependent variable with the independent variables (positive and negative).

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
This study aimed at perception happiness factors in Malaysia.Kuala Lampur and Kelang Vally citizen were asked to rate their points on the study and pencil questionnaire.It is understand that the Malaysian people in terms of happy rate, most aspects contribute of persons are related to a health issue and good health.Consequently, the important issue for a happy family is good health.Furthermore, the correlation matrix has significant correlations among happiness factors.

Table 1 :
Frequency table of happiness

Table 4 :
KMO and Bartlett's test of happiness

Table 6 :
Summary of ANOVA table HBM model ANOVA b

Table 7 :
Preference coefficient regression model coefficients a