NETWORK MODELING OF HAPPINESS DETERMINANTS ACROSS LATIN AMERICAN NATIONS TODAY
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29121/shodhai.v3.i1.2026.86Keywords:
Happiness, Governance, Social Support, Network Analysis, Well-BeingAbstract
Happiness has become a central indicator for evaluating sustainable development, quality of life, governance effectiveness, and social progress. The present study examined the structural relationships among happiness determinants reported by the United Nations for Latin American countries through a Gephi-based network model. A non-experimental, cross-sectional, and correlational design was implemented using secondary data derived from international databases. The analysis incorporated happiness score, gross domestic product per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and perceptions of corruption as the principal variables. Network analysis techniques were employed to estimate the intensity, direction, and centrality of relationships among indicators. The resulting model identified social support, freedom of choice, and healthy life expectancy as the most influential nodes within the network structure. Gross domestic product per capita exhibited positive indirect effects through health and freedom pathways, whereas perceptions of corruption generated negative effects across multiple dimensions of subjective well-being. The network displayed high density, strong clustering, and low average path length, indicating substantial interdependence among variables. Community detection procedures revealed the existence of interconnected social-human development and institutional-economic subsystems. The findings suggest that happiness in Latin America emerges from the interaction of social, economic, institutional, and health-related factors rather than from isolated determinants. The Gephi model demonstrated that subjective well-being is shaped by multidirectional relationships connecting individual opportunities, social cohesion, institutional quality, and developmental conditions. These results contribute to the advancement of network-based approaches to happiness research and provide evidence supporting multidimensional strategies for improving quality of life, governance performance, and sustainable development throughout Latin America.
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