What is generosity to people?
This brings us to the second part of our project: Finding a way to analyse how people view generosity and comparing it to the WHR method. There are three main components of generosity that we are interested in:
- The proportion that one gives concerning the amount he/she has
- Acts of service versus monetary contribution
- Intentions behind acts of generosity
We isolated these components because debates about them are common and many seem to have an opinion on what generosity constitutes.
Why we chose to conduct our survey:
We believe that the WHR’s method of collecting data on generosity, with regards to happiness, is incomplete. Despite our views on the WHR scope of happiness we still hypothesise that the more generous one is, the happier they are. To explore this hypothesis, we created the second section of our survey that asks respondents to evaluate how generous they think they are through a series of statements and questions answered through a 7 point scale. The participants would be given a chance to include any neutral opinions so that they will not give votes that do not correspond with how they are feeling. There are also more aspects of generosity that we would like to evaluate which is why we decided to conduct a survey. Hence, our survey sought to understand how people perceive the subjective concept of generosity. We asked about our respondents first to ensure that the responses they gave when evaluating generosity were grounded in their personal experience and observations. However, for the flow of our analysis, we will be discussing the components of generosity first. We hope that we will be able to get greater insights as to what generosity is to the public, apart from just monetary donations, as well as investigate perceptions towards generosity.
Data from our survey:
We managed to obtain 120 responses in the survey we sent. Below are the details of the composition of the respondents in our survey:
We started the survey with questions about the age and gender to ensure that there was representation from each group.
Understandably, the largest percentage of our respondents are between the ages of 15 to 25 as we sent the survey to our peers in university. The second-largest age group is 56 to 65 because we approached our parents who shared the survey with their friends.
There is a larger proportion of females than males that responded. We also included an ‘Others’ category for inclusivity. That being said, we didn’t receive sufficient responses to perform an analysis that is representative of the views of this group. Sadly, we had to remove their responses when conducting the gender-related analysis.
Section 1 of the survey:
We wanted to understand if the proportion of net worth that a person gives to others affects whether people will perceive him/her as generous
The first two questions of this part are: ‘If a person’s net worth is above $1,000,000, donating above $1000 is considered generous’ and ‘If a person’s net worth is above $10,000, donating above $1000 is considered generous.’.*
As can be seen in these pie charts, generally a greater proportion of people feel that if someone with a lower net worth donates the same amount as someone with a greater net worth, the former is considered to be more generous. This shows that indeed, people do place importance on the monetary factor when considering generosity. But perhaps their choices could have been influenced by the presence of either question. One thing to think about could be whether if we removed the second question, more people would think that the former (net worth $1,000,000) is still considered generous since there is no comparison made between 2 subjects.
*In our survey, these 2 questions were placed in that particular order, so participants could contemplate if they still feel that someone with a greater net worth would be considered generous about someone with a lower net worth.
As can be seen in the above chart, the majority feels that the normal individual is more generous. Again, the proportion of money donated is concerned. However, regretfully a flaw in our survey here would be our lack of specification on what defines a ‘normal individual’. On a spectrum, ideally this ‘normal individual’ and Bill Gates should lie relatively far apart from each other in terms of assets.
This pie chart reflects that the majority (72.5%) feel that acts of service are more important than monetary donations when it comes to happiness. This result could perhaps be attributed to the extent of help one is providing. Going on a VIA project would mean providing not just physical help but also sharing with the target group, lifelong skill sets and technology that they might not have been aware of. The organisation of a VIA project also costs quite a large sum of money, considering the gathering of resources, accommodation of participants, and plane ticket prices. However, what if we had made the monetary donation a larger sum, say $10,000, instead of $100? We would then expect the proportion of votes to be more well balanced. There is also the issue of the intentions behind voluntourism. Voluntourism, a form of tourism in which travellers participate in voluntary work, typically for a charity, is critiqued by many. As very concisely summarized in this article,
voluntourism breeds ‘white-saviour complexes’, the daft idea that white people should help non-white people as they cannot help themselves, and also the fact that many people partake in voluntourism because they want to feel rewarded by the experience. If one partakes in voluntourism with the wrong intentions, should they then be deemed as generous? We will move on to discuss this in our next survey question below.
Here, the majority, 82.5%, believe that Bob’s intentions behind his act of generosity negate his actions. This shows that although one’s level of generosity can be quantified if one has motives behind their actions then one is perceived to be not generous at all.
Finding out if age and gender play a part in the percentage of yes/no responses:
We were interested to see if the factor of age and gender would have some correlation to the responses in this section of the survey. Since we are working with nominal data (a subset of categorical data), we needed to use a chi-square test with the null hypothesis that the proportion of responses across age groups and genders follow the proportion of yes/no responses in the entire sample.
Method: chi-square test on nominal data (at 0.05 significance level)
Besides the age category in the question, ‘If a person’s net worth is above $10,000, donating above $1000 is considered generous’ with a p-value lower than 0.05, the tests on the categories and questions show insufficient evidence to conclude that there is a relationship between the age/gender and proportion of a certain response. We recognise that that the division of 120 respondents across five categories possibly reduced the accuracy of this test. We need to revisit this hypothesis and continue to explore our dataset.
Possible Reasons for Our Results (Methodology):
- Insufficient data for each category: While we collected responses from 120 people when we did a comparison by age, the numbers in each age group were smaller
- Unequal group size for each category: We did not have an equal proportion of male to female who responded to our survey, having more female than male respondents. We also had an unequal amount of people in each age group.
Overall reflection about our survey:
We did receive feedback that some of the questions felt leading to our respondents.
We see how the presentation of our survey question could lead respondents into picking a certain option, for example, ‘the normal individual’ instead of ‘Bill Gates’. However, we also felt the need to use either ‘significant’ people for comparison or imaginary people to ensure that respondents could answer based on their past observations and judgements.
In the question about donating money vs going on a VIA trip, perhaps we should have included an amount greater than $100, that is more or less equal to the financial resources required to carry out an overseas VIA project, to mitigate the possibility that the participants would base their responses of the difference in the amount of money involved.
All of these aspects were not covered in the WHR’s method on collecting results on generosity, but as seen in our survey results, they do play a pretty big role in determining one’s level of generosity. Thank you for reading up till here, and stay tuned as we will be back with the next part of this generosity series to determine the actual correlation between generosity and happiness!
