Fake Data on Happiness

Description

This is a toy ("fake") data set I might use to illustrate the so-called curvilinear effect of age on happiness.

Usage

fakeHappiness

Format

A data frame with 1000 observations on the following 8 variables.

age

a numeric vector for age.

female

a numeric that equals 1 if the respondent is a woman

collegeed

a numeric vector that equals 1 if the respondent says s/he has a college degree

famincr

a numeric vector for the respondent's household income. Ranges from 1 to 12.

bornagain

a numeric vector for whether the respondent self-identifies as a born-again Christian.

e

random noise, generated from a normal distribution with a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 3

happy

an arbitrary happiness variable. See details for its construction

z_happy

the same arbitrary happiness variable, scaled to have a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1. This makes it seem more "latent".

Details

Data are randomly sampled from the TV16 data set in the same package for the age, female, college education, family income, and born-again variables. Thereafter, I created an arbitrary "happiness" variable that is equal to 100 - .95*age + .01*(age^2) + .25*female + .05*famincr + .1*bornagain + e. The data are not supposed to be realistic, per se. They're supposed to be functional for this purpose.