Ideas Concerning Project 2

I’m going to try to answer the question “Does quality of life affect happiness?” I think are several things that are very important that are part of determining the answer to my question. I want to analyze how people from different countries, incomes, and cultures react to adversity, how important relativity is in determining the potential for people to be happy; that is, how well off they are relative to people in their community or to the lives they know exist elsewhere. I’m most interested in studying how quality of life affects the formation of culture, and how much culture impacts happiness as a whole. I plan on looking into talking people who focus on cultural studies as well people who have an extensive knowledge of the mental health of both Americans, whom I am fairly familiar with by this point, and people of other countries and cultures.

What sparked my question was the constant barrage of information claiming that Americans are some the least happy people in the world. However, I rarely hear statistics about whether not people in developing countries are struggling to be happy. I wondered whether or not this is because its hard to gather information on this, or is they are in fact happier than many people who live in the first world despite having worse living conditions. I decided that perhaps culture has a big deal to do with the answer, and because culture is greatly affected by living conditions, I concluded this would be an important part of formulating an answer.

I think to gather information I need to specifically look into meeting with someone who works for the non-profit organizations Cultural Tourism DC to hear what they have to say on how living conditions have affected the development of culture. Additionally, because I’m living in Washington, I’ll probably try to speak to embassy workers to hear their opinions on how culture affects the happiness of people. It helps to have a diverse teaching staff at GW, where many professors (and students as well) are international. I’m unsure how to go about the psychology portion of this. I’m sure I’ll find some more good primary sources over times, but less come to the head than when I think of culturally rich people I could potentially talk to.

I’m definitely having trouble deciding what I’m going to do for the project. I’m either going to write a musical composition for guitar, write a short story, or narrate a podcast.  I've narrated projects in the past and had a lot of fun doing it, so I’m probably leaning towards that. My voice can be deep and convey information and ideas coherently and effectively. This way I could also include a great deal of factual information. However, because my topic of interest is culture, I may end up writing a composition that I would record on guitar or finale, or write a short story. Both of these more artistic formats would allow me to use different styles of writing and music to represent aspects of different cultures and their emotional power. The good news is that I feel comfortable with doing any of the above, and I can decide which to use once I get the general idea of how the answer to my question would best be displayed.