Intelligence, Art, and Sport Participation on Life Satisfaction

Intelligence, Art, and Sport Participation on Life Satisfaction Connor Armitage Long Beach State University Instructor: Trevor Pickering

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Intelligence, Art, and Sport Participation on Life Satisfaction

Background

Many factors contribute to an individual’s overall satisfaction with their life. The aim of this paper is to examine three of these factors; namely: how often someone participates in the arts, how often someone participates in sports, and how intelligent someone is compared to their peers. Previous research has shown that participation in art activities can lead to overall improved mood and happiness (Rogers & Zaragoza-Loa 2003). This belief has also found its way into popular culture and is used as a therapeutic activity. Like art, participation in sports is also viewed as an effective way to cope with stress and as a healthy release. Its role within our society to bring together members of the community has been cemented for centuries and this too is well supported by research (Tasiemski, Kennedy, Gardner, & Taylor 2005). Our culture also highly values intelligence as a trait because of social reasons and because high levels of intelligence contribute to our ability to accomplish our goals. For these reasons intelligence is also instrumental in an individual’s satisfaction with life (Koydemir, Simsek, Schutz, &Tipandjan 2013). While each of these factors’ effects on Life Satisfaction is well documented in the research the relative strength of each in relation to one another has not been quantified. This paper will first attempt to independently confirm the previous results and answer the following question: Is Art Participation, Sport Participation, or Intelligence the best predictor for Overall Life Satisfaction?

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Intelligence, Art, and Sport Participation on Life Satisfaction While these traits may have been shown to contribute to Life Satisfaction, it is the belief of this researcher that much of their effect on an individual hinges on that individual’s ability to use them in a social setting. Therefore the second question this research will strive to answer is if Shyness plays a moderating role on the effect of Art Participation, Sport Participation, and Intelligence on Overall Life Satisfaction. The following illustration shows the proposed relationships:

Another possibility is that each of these variables’ effects are in fact being distorted and magnified by another variable, and that this variable is confounding the relationship between each of the previously mentioned variables and Life Satisfaction. This researcher believes that an individual’s level of confidence in himself may be this other variable, and so the third and final analysis done will be to ascertain whether an individual’s level of Confidence plays a confounding relationship between Art Participation, Sport Participation, Intelligence and their effect on Life Satisfaction. The following illustration shows the proposed relationships:

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Intelligence, Art, and Sport Participation on Life Satisfaction

Methods
Participants and Measures The data used in this study was part of a larger data set collected for the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (hereafter PSID). Specifically we will be examining the Transition into adulthood section of the study done in 2011. The survey was conducted using a phone interview format with adolescents who were at least 18 years old and who had left high school. The interview included questions about use of time, psychological functioning, employment, career goals, outlook, and family responsibilities. For the purposes of this study we will limit our analysis to the psychological aspects of the interview. Overall Life Satisfaction was originally coded into a scale from 1-5, 1 meaning ‘completely satisfied’ and 5 meaning ‘Not at all satisfied’. Additionally, 0 meant an inappropriate response, 8 meant the respondent didn’t know, and 9 meant the participant refused to answer. In order for the results to be more interpretable the 1-5 scale was reversed and participants who answered with a ‘0’, ‘8’, or ‘9’ were filtered out of the analysis altogether.
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Intelligence, Art, and Sport Participation on Life Satisfaction The other questions were coded more logically, how often a subject participated in sports and art were each coded on a scale from 0-9: 0 meaning they had no participation, and 7 meaning they participated in the activity every day. Again, 8 meant the respondent didn’t know, and 9 meant the participant refused to answer. Participants who answered ‘8’ or ‘9’ were once again excluded from analysis. Intelligence, Shyness, and Confidence were essentially coded the same but without the possibility of a ‘0’ response. Once again, ‘8’ and ‘9’ responses were not analyzed. Out of the 1907 observations collected only 2 of them had to be deleted listwise by this criteria (both of which had 8 or ‘didn’t know’ responses) which leads this researcher to believe that the data was likely already edited by the original researchers. Finally, each of the 5 variables used for prediction were centered on their means to make the results of their analysis more interpretable.

Analysis and Results

The first question (Between Art Participation, Sport Participation, and Intelligence, which is the best predictor of Life Satisfaction?) was answered using a standard regression analysis. The equation for which is illustrated as: Ŷ= b0 + b1XArt + b2XSport + b3XIntel The Prediction model was significant, F(3,1906) = 9.512, p < .001, and the model accounted for about 1.5% of the variance in Life Satisfaction (adjusted R2 = .013). Surprisingly, Art Participation was not a significant predictor of Life Satisfaction, (β < .001, p = .983). This came as a shock because previous research has shown a relationship between these two

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Intelligence, Art, and Sport Participation on Life Satisfaction variables. Intelligence was a good predictor in the model however, (β = .067, p = .004). And strongest of all was Sport Participation, (β = .106, p = .001). Therefore, when the three variables were regressed against Life Satisfaction the one with the most predictive power is Sport Participation. Table 1 illustrates these values.

The second question (Does Shyness play a moderating role in the effect Art Participation, Sport Participation, and Intelligence have on Life Satisfaction?) was also run using a standard regression analysis, but with Shyness and its interaction effects on each of the other three predictor variables added to the model. With the addition of these four items to the model the new regression equation becomes:

Ŷ= b0 + b1XArt + b2XSport + b3XIntel + b4MShy + b5XArtMShy + b6XSportMShy + b7XIntelMShy The prediction model was significant, F(7,1906) = 6.989, p < .001, R2 = .025. (Adjusted R2 = .022). The addition of Shyness and the interaction terms in the model accounted for an R2 change of .01 which was also significant, p < .001. The additional variable which increased R2 by the most was Shyness, (β = -.096, p = . 001). The interaction effect of Shyness and Art Participation was not significant, (β = -.03, p = .

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Intelligence, Art, and Sport Participation on Life Satisfaction 182). Neither was the interaction effect between Shyness and Intelligence, (β = .015, p = .684). The interaction effect with the greatest effect, Shyness and Sport Participation, still was not significant, (β = -.022, p = .34). These values can be viewed together on table 2. Based on the lack of significance found with each of the interaction effects the data has given us substantial evidence that Shyness does not in fact play a moderating role between the effects of Art Participation, Sport Participation, and Intelligence on Life Satisfaction. For the sake of completion a Simple Slopes Analysis was run to asses how the effect of Sport Participation changes at three different levels of Shyness, as if the interaction effect was significant. The results of this are depicted in Table 3 and Graph 1.

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Intelligence, Art, and Sport Participation on Life Satisfaction

The Final Question involved in this analysis (Does Confidence play a confounding role in the effect of Art Participation, Sport Participation, and Intelligence on Life Satisfaction?) was answered first by examining whether Confidence was correlated with Life Satisfaction, the first criteria it must meet in order to be considered a confound. After performing a Pearson correlation, it was found to be significantly correlated with Life Satisfaction, (r = .197, p < .001). Next a Pearson Correlation was conducted between Confidence and the predictors Sport Participation and Intelligence, given that they were the only significant predictors in the first analysis. Confidence was shown to be significantly correlated with Intelligence, (r = .447, p < . 001), but not Sport Participation (r = .019, p =.419). The final test to asses whether Confidence can be considered a confound was conducted by adding Confidence into the original model as a predictor and seeing how much the b coefficients of the other predictors change. The new model equation :

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Intelligence, Art, and Sport Participation on Life Satisfaction Ŷ= b0 + b1XArt + b2XSport + b3XIntel + b4XConf With Confidence included in the model Sport participation’s b coefficient only changes from .106 to .096 (a 9.4% change), which together with the fact that it is not correlated with confidence suggests that the effect of Sport Participation on Life Satisfaction is not confounded by Confidence. However in the new model the b coefficient of intelligence changes from .067 to -0.027 (a 140% change), this taken together with the high correlation between Confidence and Intelligence gives us strong evidence that the effect of Intelligence (but not Sport Participation or Art Participation) on Life Satisfaction is confounded by an individual’s Confidence. Table 4 illustrates the percentages changes of the b coefficients.

Discussion
The first finding of this research was that both Intelligence and Sport Participation were predictors of Life Satisfaction but that Sport Participation was the stronger of the two. The most obvious application of this finding is that in order to increase Life Satisfaction one should strive to participate in sports more. Further research in this direction could try to analyze which sports provide the most benefit to life satisfaction and what about them specifically increases an individual’s overall life satisfaction.

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Intelligence, Art, and Sport Participation on Life Satisfaction The second question found that despite the expectations of the researcher Shyness did not play a moderation role between the predictors and the criterion variable within this data. One alternative explanation for this is that the lack of significance was due to there being an inordinate number of participants who were not involved in sports or art at all, and that this skewness affected the analysis. If the number of athletes and artists were more normally distributed there may have been more positive results. Finally, the last section discovered that Confidence was a confound for the relationship between Intelligence and Life Satisfaction but the same was not true for Sport or Art Participation. One explanation for the high correlation between Confidence, Intelligence, and Life Satisfaction is the nature in which the data was collected. Participants who said that they were highly intelligent were already exhibiting high confidence by doing so. Furthermore, one could argue that life satisfaction and confidence in oneself are highly related. Further research in this area could then try to measure these variables in a more objective way than phone interviews.

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Intelligence, Art, and Sport Participation on Life Satisfaction

Appendix
Output for question 1:

Output for Question 2:

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Intelligence, Art, and Sport Participation on Life Satisfaction

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Intelligence, Art, and Sport Participation on Life Satisfaction Output for Question 3:

df

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Intelligence, Art, and Sport Participation on Life Satisfaction

References:
Rogers, M. A., & Zaragoza-Loa, E., (2003). Happiness and Children’s Health: An Investigation of Art, Entertainment, and Recreation. American Journal of Public Health.(3) : 2 Koydemir, S., Simsek, O. F., Schutz, A., & Tipandjan, A., (2012). Differences in How Trait Emotional Intelligence Predicts Life Satisfaction: The Role of Affect Balance Versus Social Support in India and Germany. Science Business Media. 14:51-66. Tasiemski, T., Kennedy, P., Gardner, B. P., & Taylor, N., (2005). The Association of sports and physical recreation with life satisfaction in a community of people with spinal cord injuries. NeuroRehabilitation. 20:253-265.

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