Happiness as a social phenomenon

Introduction The present society is impossible without the feeling of real happiness on the part of its members. The movement of the Ukrainian society to high socio-economic indices of the developed countries should first and foremost contribute to the number of happy people. However, the happy perception of the world in general and one’s life in particular is a very complicated subject for analysis. Unfortunately, Ukrainian sociologists pay insufficient attention to the study of this topic because of the difficult social reforms taking place in the Ukrainian society. That’s why the present work aims at investigating happiness as a social phenomenon in general and peculiarities of its perception in the Ukrainian society in particular. In terms of the above-formulated aim the following problems should be considered: the definition of the notion ‘happiness’ in terms of its scientific-theoretical and subjective-everyday spheres; the analysis of the factors influencing the perception of happiness; the study of empirical data concerning the feeling of happiness by people in general and by separate groups in the Ukrainian society in particular. The life of an individual and the society is in the sphere of the abstract category ‘happiness’. In spite of the fact that the problem of ‘happiness’ is considered to be one of the ‘eternal’ issues the solution to it should be found by people living today. Let’s turn to the definition of the term ‘happiness’ that we trace in scientific prose. Thus, from the sociological point of view “Happiness is a psychological condition characteristic of a person feeling satisfaction with his existence, completeness and comprehension of his life and realization of his purpose”. Consequently, the notion of happiness reveals the ideas about how man’s life should be, but at the further insight into the problem it should be emphasized that the notion of ‘happiness’ is an abstract one and almost everyone can provide his own