Optimism Wint, Htut Khine, Natalie and Eleanor

Why Optimism? ●Benefits to a person-Good Trait? o How to improve oneself ●How mental attitude affects society o What changes in society if more Optimists? o Good or Bad thing for society? ●Testing our own personal hypotheses o Put them on the line!

Goals ●Defining Optimism o Finding questions that relate ●Calculating Optimism score from ?’s ●What affects optimism? (Question 1) ●What optimism effects? (Question 2)

Optimism Definition ●Hopefulness or positivity about the future, our role in society and outcomes

Data sets ●Didn’t have a data set that directly measured optimism. ●PEW o Used to calculate optimism score o Explanatory and response variables for optimism ●Gallup Poll ○Collected National data about how optimistic people are about their city ○Used to validate the results of our own optimism calculation

Cleaning the Data ●Change to CSV format ●Removing unnecessary columns ●Convert optimism questions to numerics ●Change “Don’t know/Refused” to “NA” o Don’t know is ambiguous ●Calculating Optimism score ●Change states to regions - Gallup Poll

Optimism Score ●Chose 23 questions from the Pew study. ●Weighted each question by relevance to optimism ●Gallup Poll, Distribution!

Optimism Distributions

Hypotheses - Question 1 ●Explanatory variables for Optimism o Demographics (Age, Gender, etc.) o Least likely to be affected by optimism  No crossover ●See if certain demographics lead to higher optimism o Groups with societal advantages would be more optimistic (Caucasian, Upper Class, Christians) o Women more optimist  Assumption that women are more positive

Findings and Analysis ●Gender, Race, Religion

Findings and Analysis-Income

Findings and Analysis-Age

Hypotheses-Question 2 ●Evolved through analysis of Question 1 ●How does mental attitude affect views on society? o Optimism is good for society  Subjective o Optimists would be open to change in society  View change as good thing

Findings and Analysis-Question 2

Complications ●Lacked details in demographics o “Not employed” ●Long Questionnaire and Phone Interview o Not accurate ●Gallup Poll o City Optimism-Not perfect comparison ●Wider spread of demographics o Many Southern, Christians, White

Future Analysis/Application ●Data set not specifically about optimism o Make specific poll for optimism o Accurate score ●Investigate the role Realism ●More effectively promote social change o Focus on Pessimists ●Use in therapy o More effectively treatments o Understand what causes poor mental attitude

Conclusions ●Most people are optimistic! ●Unchangeable demographics do not affect optimism ●Other demographics have a logical trend ●Optimists are open to societal changes

Class Optimism! Class Minimum: Class Maximum: Class Mode: Class Average (mean):

Class Optimism! Class Minimum: 1 Class Maximum: Class Mode: Class Average (mean):

Class Optimism! Class Minimum: 1 Class Maximum: 9 Class Mode: Class Average (mean):

Class Optimism! Class Minimum: 1 Class Maximum: 9 Class Mode: 8 Class Average (mean):

Class Optimism! Class Minimum: 1 Class Maximum: 9 Class Mode: 8 Class Average (mean): 6.36

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