Colombian Happiness: A Look at Life Satisfaction and Explanatory Style

This project examines the explanatory style of Colombians, the habitual way in
which they explain the good and bad events that occur in their lives, and its relationship
to life satisfaction. Two hundred and twenty Colombians completed a life satisfaction
question, the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ), and demographic questions.
Simple means, correlations, and a multiple regression analysis were used to assess the
results. The results of the ASQ were also compared to two previously conducted studies:
a comparison of American and Chinese national levels of explanatory style and a study
conducted on a non-clinical sample of American adults. The results of this study showed
that the mean of Colombian overall explanatory style is more optimistic than the mean
overall explanatory style for participants in both the United States and mainland China.
There are no correlations between individual responses of life satisfaction and
explanatory style for the full sample; however, national means for explanatory style seem
to correlate with national means of life satisfaction. The multiple regression analysis showed that when taking explanatory style, gender, age, stratum, income, education,
occupation, and city into account, the only factors that are statistically significant are
occupation and city. More specifically, the results show that those Colombians who Jive
in Barranquilla, Bucaramanga, and Medillfn will tend to have higher levels of life
satisfaction than those who live in Bogota, and those who are unemployed will tend to
have a lower level of life satisfaction than those who work.