The World Database of Happiness (WDoH) is a finding archive. It stores results of empirical research on happiness in the sense of life-satisfaction. These research findings are described in a standard format and terminology on electronic finding pages. The database holds some 40.000 such finding pages, which can be sorted in various ways, such as on the people investigated, methods used and subjects of correlates.

The WDoH is a tool for harvesting the growing scientific knowledge on this subject. It provides an overview of the available research findings and prepares for research synthesis.

Next to a bibliography of scientific publications on this subject, the WDoH provides standardized abstracts of research findings. Two kinds of findings are involved:
1) ‘distributional findings’ on how happy people are in particular times and places
2) ‘correlational findings’ on the things that go together with more or less happiness.

The WDoH allows an overview of the otherwise nebulous research literature by
a) limiting to a clearly defined concept of happiness (life satisfaction)
b) presenting the available findings in a standard format and terminology
c) providing fine-grained classifications by means of which users can find their way in the growing mass of happiness facts.

The WDoH covers the empirical research on happiness since 1908 and is kept up to date continuously.

The WDoH is available free of charge for everybody all over the world.

Read more in paper World Database of Happiness: A finding archive

Key points in Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Russian, Spanish