A Study on Happiness and Related Factors Among Indian College Students

Happiness is considered to be one of the ultimate goals of life. This paper studies the happiness of Indian college and university students aged between 18 and 24 years. It attempts to answer whether and to what extent happiness of a student is significantly related to aspects of social life such as time spent with family, friends, being in a relationship, logging into social networking sites; academic factors such as job prospects of the chosen field of study and academic environment; and other personal factors such as health condition, over thinking or dwelling on past bad memories, addiction to tobacco/drug/alcohol. Moreover, this paper also inquires about the relationship between a student’s average happiness with her gender as well as the income class to which she belongs. It has been observed that among different aspects of social life, time spent with family and friends are significant while logging into social networking site is found out to be insignificant. Also being in a relationship is significantly but negatively related to happiness for male students. Job Prospects of the current field of study is a highly significant covariate of happiness irrespective of the gender of the student. Among different aspects of the personal situation, dwelling on past bad memories decreases happiness of both male and female students. Addiction to tobacco/alcohol is a negative covariate of female happiness. Furthermore, income and gender are seen to play an insignificant role in the happiness of Indian college and university students.

     

Hierarchical clustering analysis framework of mutually exclusive crash causation parameters for regional road safety strategies

Hierarchical clustering analysis framework is developed to identify benchmark and critical regions for effective road safety strategies. The regions are grouped based on agglomeration coefficient of mutually exclusive crash causation parameters. Subsequently, regions from groups with lower than a threshold index value are selected as benchmark for the poorly performing critical counterparts. Euclidean distance-based Ward's, median and centroid clustering techniques are explored through a case study of Indian states and Union Territories. As per data between 2006 and 2015, fatal crash percentages of driving under influence of drug and alcohol, excessive speeding, vehicle malfunction and road conditions related crash causation parameters, severity index and its growth rate are assessed based on respective threshold values of 6.35%, 43.28%, 2.42%, 1.79%, 26.7 and 3.1%. These are the national average of respective indices. It demonstrated the unique application of hierarchical clustering analysis in benchmark and critical region identification.