Birth Order and Happiness

THE EFFECT OF BIRTH ORDER ON HAPPINESS

Happiness is sought after by many: inspirational speakers and motivational writers have made millions of dollars just by telling people how to reach their desires and how to achieve happiness. People crave step by step instructions and personal insight on how to save their marriage, friendship or even their career. Happiness can be measured in many different aspects such as: marriage, success, extraversion, self-esteem, optimism and a sense of self control (Myers 2007). So, there are many ways researchers can attempt to measure happiness. In addition to the mentioned, there is also happiness in relation to birth order. This relation has been of interest to many researchers, but few have successfully attempted to measure its correlation.
To those who did succeed, the research shows that different birth order ranks show some common personality traits. They correlated birth order with personality types: first born, second born, middle/later and last born. Paulhus, Trapness, and Chen (1999) theorize that birth order effects come from the competition that siblings feel when trying to find their place in the family. Such as how the first born is usually stereotyped as the “responsible, competitive and traditional (Jefferson, Herbst & McCrae, 1998). The first born has no competition to fit into the family, so their only goal is to please the parents through the normally expected like college and responsible behavior (Paulhus, Trapnell &Chen, 1998). The second born has a high level of competition with the first child so they tend to be characterized as a rebel or ‘open-minded’. Bossard and Stoker
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Boll (1995) say that it has to do with how they gain their recognition and build their self esteem. There has also been some research that has tried to determine if similarity in personality traits that influence relationship satisfaction, therefore, influencing their over all happiness level (Shiota &Levenson, 2007;Gattis & Berns, 2004; Dyrenforth et al, 2010). I hypothesize that the higher you are in the birth ranking, the happier you are; that there will be a significant relationship between birth ranking and happiness levels. The higher you are in the ranking of birth order the more they tend to identify less with their parents and identify more with their peers (Sulloway, Salmon and Daly 1998). Last-borns even score higher on personality tests, in particular areas such as agreeableness and low in narcissism. (Sulloway, 1999). Narcissism is excessive self-love, vanity and smugness; all characteristics of those lacking in happiness. Happiness influences many aspects of life. Any thing from marriage, success, extraversion, self-esteem, optimism and a sense of self control (Myers 2007). Aspects of life that millions of people crave to succeed in, that millions live for.

Methods
Participants

Younger adults (__women, __men, M-age= ___ years, age range: _____) were recruited through class assignment at the University of Utah. Participants were compensated 20 points of class credit for participation in the study. All participants were asked to answer all of the questions to the best of their ability, resulting in competent answers.
Materials
There were a total of 7 quizzes taken by the student body. 5 of the 7 were taken online that contained questions on happiness and the Big Five personality test (in which we drew introversion and extroversion ratings). The other quiz was created by Professor Ilse Dekoeyer-Laros and her TA’s that contained questions on age, sex (M/F), birth order and meditation. The last quiz was taken in person that contained questions on attractiveness and sex (M/F). All data was configured into a main data base in SSPS. Happiness ratings. Happiness was scaled on three different quizzes online (http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx a site at Penn State, by Dr. Martin Seligman and his colleagues): Authentic Happiness Survey (24 questions; scale from 1.00 to 5.00), Fordyce Emotions Questionnaire (Scale from 0 to 100, % of time happy, % of time unhappy, % of time neutral ), General Happiness Scale (4 questions; scale from 1 to 7, 1 being not at all, 7 being a great deal). Big Five Personality. The Big Five Personality scale online (http://www.outofservice.com/bigfive/) places you into a percentile along the OCEAN acronym (openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.) One can scale from 1 to 100 percentile on each personality characteristic.