Older people are nation's happiest( Americans grow happier as they grow ...),Health

Americans grow happier as they grow older, according to a University of Chicago study that is one of the most thorough examinations of happiness ever done in America.

The study also found that baby boomers are not as content as other generations, African Americans are less happy than whites, men are less happy than women, happiness can rise and fall between eras, and that, with age the differences narrow.

Understanding happiness is important to understanding quality of life. The happiness measure is a guide to how well society is meeting peoples needs, said Yang Yang, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago and author of the article, Social Inequalities in Happiness in the United States, 1972-2004: An Age-Period-Cohort Analysis, published in the April issue of the American Sociological Review, the official journal of the American Sociological Association.

The research relies on data that social scientists consider the gold standard of happiness researchresponses to questions about contentment with overall life gathered in the General Social Survey of the National Opinion Research Center, which the National Science Foundation supports at the University of Chicago.

Since 1972, the GSS has asked a cross section of Americans the same question: Taken all together, how would you say things are these dayswould you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy? The question was administered in face-to-face interviews of population samples that ranged from about 1,500 to 3,000.

Yang charted happiness across age and racial groups and found that among 18-year-olds, white women are the happiest, with a 33 percent probability of being very happy, followed by white men (28 percent), black women (18 percent) and black men (15 percent).

Differences vanish over time, however, as happiness increases. Black men and black women have just more than a 50 percent chance of being very happy by
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