Abstract:
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The main purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships between
happiness and mental health (MH), socioeconomic status (SES), work-life balance
(WL), family satisfaction (FS) and community satisfaction (CS). The variables of
happiness are consisted of three components: life satisfaction, positive affect and
negative affect. There are two elements for mental health: mental capacity (coping
ability) and mental quality (kindness and altruism) while socioeconomic status
variable is a composite indicator of education and income. We used the secondary
data from the National Statistics Office of Thailand. The samples are composed of
8,585 voluntary respondents aged 15 years and over. The data were analyzed using
structural equation modelling (SEM) with AMOS version 23.0 in order to test the
relationships of factors affecting happiness.
The findings revealed that happiness was significantly correlated with
SES, MH, FS, WL and CS. The correlations between happiness and SES, MH, FS,
WL and CS were .32, .31, .22, .14 and .08, respectively. The total effect of SES, MH,
FS, WL and CS toward happiness were .35, .306, .316, .165 and .216, respectively.
The results suggested that SES, MH and FS were highly correlated with Thai
workforce’s happiness while WL and CS had rather low correlation with happiness.
Mental health which comprising of coping ability, kindness and altruism played an
important role as a partial mediator between happiness and all affecting factors. There was a high statistically significant relationship between FS and CS which the
covariance between FS and CS was 0.34. Moreover, the developed SEM model of
happiness was proved to be able to predict happiness at an acceptable level of 40%
(R2 = 0.4).
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