Visualizing happiness: drawing as a method to explore social representations of children’s happiness

Happiness is a topic that has gained increased public and academic attention in Finland and internationally in the recent years, not least due to the United Nation’s World Happiness Report (WHR) having ranked Finland as ‘the happiest country in the world’ in 2018-2021. While the WHR gives reason to believe the general population in Finland experiences high rates of life satisfaction, the report strictly represents the adult civilian national population, thus ignoring all children under the age of 15. Overall, research on children’s and young people’s happiness has lagged behind the study of adults (Uusitalo-Malmivaara, 2012, Ninomiya, 2021). The proposed research aims to offer an insight into lay understandings of happiness from the perspective of Finnish children (10-12 years old) employing qualitative research methodologies encompassing both visual and textual accounts.

Statistics show that while Finnish primary school pupils perform exceptionally well on international academic school assessments (e.g. PISA, OECD, 2018), children’s life satisfaction declines steadily starting from the fifth grade, particularly among girls (Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, 2021). Studies show that happy children are not only healthier, but also more likely to display adaptive behavior, higher emotional literacy and school performance (Erricker, 2009), which is why understanding what makes children happy is not only a timely but also a highly relevant research topic that deserves in-depth and multifaceted investigation.