What is the truth of Happiness?

Happiness Experiment

Hypothesis: If I spend 30 minutes a day walking my two dogs with my older

step-brother, I can increase my happiness. My step-brother Nathan and I both have a very
close bond with our family dogs, but we never really do anything with them. I know that
if we take them out more and go on a 30 minute-ish walk everyday not only will we be
relieving our own stress and increasing our happiness, but we could quite possibly be
increasing our dogs as well.

Note: The reason I am including my step-brother in this experiment is because he is

grounded from technology right now, and I know he will jump at the opportunity for
walking the dogs. It would be rude for me to just deny him to go on a walk with us.

Procedure:
1. At the start of the week my brother and I will both take the Oxford Happiness test
and record our initial happiness level.
2. Each day before our walk (about an hour or so after school gets let out), we will
record on a scale of 1-5, 1 being the unhappiest and 5 being the happiest, our
happiness level.
3. We will take our dogs out of their yard and put them on leashes. I will most likely
handle our lighter dog, Shakespeare, while Nathan will handle our heavier dog,
Bailey. Then we will walk our dogs for about thirty or forty minutes, and will
record the amount of time we walk from when we leave the house and return.
4. As soon as we record the time, we will record our happiness level using the same
scale.
5. At the end of the week retake the happiness Oxford Happiness test.

Data
 Day Date Walk Length Additional Notes

1 2/27/17 38 minutes Our younger dog Shakespeare got off of his leash
(or more jerked it out of my hands) to play with
another dog in our neighborhood.

2 2/28/17 27 minutes It was cold today, but the dogs had fun playing in
the snow.

3 3/2/17 Roughly 30 I actually forgot to time our walk today, but we left
minutes around 5:30 and got back shortly after 6. Also, we
didnt go on a walk yesterday because of SLCs.

4 3/3/17 17 minutes The reason the walk was so short was because my
brother was called back to the house early by his
father. Our oldest dog, Baylie, did seem rather
energetic today.

5 3/4/17 42 minutes Ryan G was over at my house today, but my

brother didnt mind him joining our walk. We
juggled around the leashes, and were out a lot
longer than expected.

Before Oxford Happiness test: 3.65- Neutral, not unhappy nor unhappy.
After Oxford Happiness test: 3.81 Neutral, not unhappy nor unhappy.

Conclusion:
Unfortunately, my hypothesis is not supported by my data. My happiness levels
stayed stagnant. It moved up a bit, but not considerably. I do still believe that if I
continued doing this every day, or every other day, then my happiness would probably
steadily rise. But for now, the good that came out of this experiment was that not only did
it get my brother and me out of the house, but the dogs seemed to enjoy themselves very
much. Im sure this means much more walks for them in the future.