Measuring Bristol’s happiness

Can you quantify happiness? Redcliffe charity Happy City believes it’s found a way.

The charity aims to measure Bristol’s collective happiness using its new survey, called Happiness Pulse, which offers an objective snapshot of the survey-taker’s wellbeing. The Happiness Pulse officially launched on Monday.

The product of four years of research, Happiness Pulse is part of the Happy City Index which aims to find correlations between people’s happiness and public services like parks, cultural activities and community involvement projects. This allows policymakers and companies to measure which improvements help improve happiness.

“A lot of community projects bust a gut to try to find a way to prove what impact they make,” says Liz Zeidler, 47, one of Happy City’s co-founders. “We can help those organisations prove the impact they’re making, and prove to policymakers that they’re not just making a small, really visible difference, but creating all these underlying differences that have an effect on the whole city.”

Happiness Pulse asks simple questions in three areas: Do, Be and Connect, as well as two questions about overall wellbeing. Survey takers choose a number between 1 (Never) and 4, 5 or 10 (Always) in response to sentences like “Over the past 2 weeks I’ve been feeling useful,” “At the moment how often do you attend courses of some kind?” and “At the moment how often do you help out informally with friends or neighbours?” 

“Be, Do, Connect basically covers mental and emotional wellbeing, behaviour wellbeing (or the things we do in our day to day lives), and social wellbeing (or how we connect with our loved ones, the community, strangers, our city, etc),” says Liz.

The survey is short and sweet, and at the end the quiz taker receives a happiness score and pointers on how to improve his or her lifestyle. It’s bright and fun – more like taking a quiz on Buzzfeed than taking a survey – and it’s interesting to look at, with bright colours and artistic representations of the Bristol. 

“We do live in a very quick, sharing, instant world,” says Liz. “It would be great if we could ask people a hundred questions and get incredibly detailed, nuanced information, but then we’d probably only have a hundred people taking it. And we want thousands of people taking it so we can get a really strong picture.

“That’s why it’s called a pulse – it’s very quick snapshot of what things are working at the moment.”

The Happiness Pulse will be as useful to individuals as it is for city officials, says Liz.

“Pausing and answering those questions makes people go, ‘Oh, I hadn’t thought about things like whether what I do feels worthwhile, or whether I have enough connections with people in my neighbourhood,'” she explains. 

Liz started Happy City with her husband after travelling around the world working with communities in Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Since beginning her research, she’s found some interesting correlations between certain lifestyle choices and happiness. 

“Intergenerational connection is very important to people’s wellbeing,” she says. “So it’s good to create more opportunities to connect with other generations. And another one is a habit of gratitude. Get into the habit of thinking about what makes you grateful, and it creates a new pathway in the brain.”

“Organisations, national governments and different cities are watching this pilot in Bristol,” says Liz. “We want as many people to benefit from it as possible.”

Find your happiness score at www.happinesspulse.org.

Read more: The Happy List 2015