An Improved Method for Measurement of Gross National Happiness Using Social Network Services

Abstract

Studies on the measurement of happiness have been utilized in a variety of areas; in particular, it has played an important role in the measurement of society stability. As the number of users of Social Network Services (SNSs) increase, efforts are being made to measure human well-being by analyzing user messages in SNSs. Most previous works mainly counted positive and negative words; they did not consider the grammar and emotion. In this paper, we reorganize the mechanism to harness the advantages of (a) Part-Of-Speech (POS) tagging for grammatical analysis, and (b) the SentiWordNet lexicon for the assignment of sentiment scores for emotion degree. We suggest a modified formula for calculating the Gross National Happiness (GNH). To verify the method, we gather a real-world dataset from 405,700 Twitter users, measure the GNH, and compare it with the Gallup well-being release. We demonstrate that the method has more precise computation ability for GNH.