I am very much a homebody. I did my share of party going as a youth, and probably did 7 or 8 other peoples share of it too. It was the norm for my area, and I did it in order to fit in, not because of a need to socialize. Weekend get togethers for gaming was all the socializing I cared for as a kid. I am not fond of travel, and am uncomfortable around crowds. I overcome these dislikes only for the occasional renaissance fair, a trip to a museum that has an exhibit I find interesting, and to go on the rare shopping spree in book stores. With the birth of the internet, I have found that my meager need to socialize can be met online.

I can be very social, and due to my upbringing play the role of host to the best of my ability when visitors drop buy. But the truth of the matter is that I am anxious for them to leave the minute they walk through the door. Even when the visitor is an old friend that I am delighted to spend time with, there is an underlying impatience that lingers until I have seen them away. I am a very private person, a little anal about my personal space and modest possessions, and dislike interruption of my routine. 

I order takeout instead of dining at a restaurant. Unless I am dying to see a certain movie I buy the dvd rather than watch it in a theater. As I have grown older I find that I tend toward formal civility in public, only expressing myself casually in the comfort of my home.  I have hundreds, perhaps even a thousand, close acquaintances, but only a handful of dear friends. Most of those friendships I have had for 30 or more years. My feelings for those friends have been known to drag me out of isolation for an evening of cafe coffee and bullshit sessions.

When it comes to intimate relationships, I have always sought out like minded women. As my intimate interests are so narrow as to exclude even most of those that find solitude comforting, I seldom formed long term relationships with members of the opposite sex. The internet helped with this as well, allowing me to contact people worldwide. As it was, the woman I did find took me three years of searching and was 1,500 miles away. Considering that my criteria for a mate includes atheism ( I could not stomach the presence of a theist as a mate ), intelligence, shared interests, a desire for solitude, and a grasp and desire for a lifestyle that is an almost unheard of subset of another lifestyle, I consider myself the luckiest bastard in the world for having found her.

I don't consider myself to be overly happy, but neither am I miserable. I've never been one to have wild peaks and troughs of emotion. I find that my emotional state is fairly steady, with only minor ups and downs.

This makes me question the validity of the study. How does one measure overall happiness? Is it measured by the peak or by the average? Is a bubbly, giddy socalite happy in an enduring sense? Do the low points in a persons life factor into the study? Is happiness really better than an emotional plane that has fewer hills and dips? I may never know. But I do know that what works for me, works well enough that I have no desire to change it.  I am content. I think I can live with that.
 

The study must be flawed in it's sampling because I am an example of being happy spending my time at home. Like I said, it helps me actually leave the house and cope on the job. I would be miserable if I didn't have that balance, and was more misserable when I didn't have that balance.

In all the jobs I have had, the ones that gave me a set schedule where I was not overworked and gave me balance I was more productive. The jobs that demanded I was on call like a dog on a leash where I spent more time at work than at home, I felt like a slave and was less productive and less happy. There is something to be said for balance and being a workoholic may work for some, it does not work for all.

 Based on what you're saying, here's the problem:

Some people who would be homebodies except for their church attendance are happier than people who don't attend church and are homebodies.  This isn't because of church specifically.  It's because of getting out of the house.

And yes, study after study shows that people who socialize more are happier than those who stay at home all the time.

BUT there is a flaw in that thinking because it DOES NOT take into account  each individual's comfort level in the amount of socialing they do. It falaciously equates quantity over quality.

As I said, I socialize at work, and that is enough for me, but I am an individual. And at this point in my life because of the balance I have, I am much happier. SOME people are different.

Being intraverted does not adress your comfort level and neither does being an extravert. My bosses son spends lots of time outside his house but he is a train reck waiting to happen because all that "partying" he does is self distructive. He is not a happy person, he merely thinks he is.

I am at my comfort level as far as my socializing and I do like being at home. How that makes me unhappy is beyond me. Otherwise all housewives with no children are automatically depressed.

If you want to merely call it a general observation or ratio, I might buy that, but I don't think it should be sold as an absolute, especially if it is not taking into account quality. Otherwise people who socialize by smoking crack together must be happy.

Well, no.  It isolates relatively good quality so that quantity is the only moving variable.

Obviously, if someone goes to "getting hit on the head lessons" three times a week, they're not going to be as happy as people who do something fun and self actualizing.

Yes, and as I said above, people who do some socializing are happier than those who don't do any, on average.  Sociology does not try to build models of everyone.  It tries to build models of groups, which almost by definition includes variation within groups.

You keep confusing individuals with groups.  Give me any random sampling of a thousand people and I'll show you a group in which people are *typically* happier, all things being equal, when they socialize with other people.  With your boss's son, all things are not equal because he was poorly socialized with regard to drinking.

Depression is very high among housewives who don't get to socialize.  This includes housewives with children since interacting with children is typically less fulfilling for adults than interacting with other adults.

Try not to use "all" statements in sociological contexts.  You're going to be wrong nearly all the time.  (Wasn't that clever?  I used "all" but I'm still correct.)

The question, Brian, is not whether you're happy or not.  Sociology is about averages.

I hope it's abundantly clear that I'm talking about averages, though not general observations.  This is a very specific observation.  Take a hundred depressed homebodies and get all one hundred of them to have more socializing experiences and most of them will see improvement in their condition.

 I think maybe you're thinking of "socializing" as not work.  To a sociologist, it's all in one broad category, which is what I'm talking about.  Thirty to forty hours of human socializing per week is plenty for a lot of people, and that happens to account for the average work week, so you definitely can get a lot of people who are comfy just going to work and back home.

Of course, you can break it down and look at people who have certain ratios of work to play, but I don't think that's particularly relevant to the broad point.

Well, myself, I have trouble quantifying 'happiness'. I tend to envision sort of 'happiness gauges' over a series of categorical things in my life at the moment rather than just an overall 'happiness' (though I'll certainly say that, when more of the gauges sink into negative territory than the ones that are in positive territory, I tend to become something of a grouch).

Right now... well, I'm not doing much face-to-face socializing at all (though plenty here, on Skype, over the phone with the fellow who's hooking me up with work in Korea, etc), which is a downer, but I haven't had any kind of money trouble or associated grocery shortages (given that I'm living with my parents), so that's a plus. Macroscopically, politics has been thrilling and encouraging lately, so that's given some more weight to the positive end of the scale, and I'm really excited about my (potential) future career as an ESL teacher.

Even with everything going right or everything going south, however, it's oddly usually just one or two key little daily events that tends to fluctuate my overall mood. I hit a patch of tremendously good fortune but my computer breaks down? I'm so upset I can't sleep. I start getting caried up shit creek and lose my paddle, but some pretty girl winks at me in the mall? I feel like a million bucks for the rest of the day.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is: how can we empirically qualify someone as being 'happy' or 'unhappy', given the fickle nature of the soups that comprise human emotion? I mean, technically, you could live the most depressing life on Earth but still feel absolutely exuberant as long as you were doped-up with the right chems. How does a study reach a sound conclusion on what sort of things will or will not make a person (on average) happy? Intuitively, I agree with the notion that social animals become depressed when not allowed to socialize - but, objectively, how do sociologists know this and how are they able to demonstrate it?

Is this the study you heard about, Brian?

www.newsdesk.umd.edu/sociss/release.cfm

This one seems to be saying the same thing but it is more an indication that unhappy people tend to watch more television than anything else.

(unless I read through it too fast and misunderstood)

It's damn tricky.  In the end, it always comes down to a certain subjectivity because happiness is ultimately self-reported, but there are pretty reliable ways of gauging relative happiness.  Psychologists design questionnaires that do a good job of negating reporting bias by cross checking it against other parts of the surveys.

For instance, it's one thing to ask for a 1 to 7 "degree of happiness" to this item:

1) I feel loved when I think about my wife/girlfriend.

It's quite another to answer another twenty very specific questions, like:

15) How many times a week do you experience momentary anger at your wife/girlfriend?

23) How many times a week do you argue with your wife/girlfriend about money?

etc, etc.

In a long questionnaire, you have dozens of questions designed to weed out the "correct answers" and get at the real answers.  If you say right off the bat that you always feel loved when you think about your girlfriend, but the rest of the test indicates that you often fight and sometimes feel like she doesn't understand you, it's an indication of reporting bias.  Also, these tests usually have "dummy" questions and questions on many subjects so that the respondent can't get a good idea of what the "correct" answer is.

Finally, though "happiness" is very hard to define, it's kind of a moot point for sociological research because whether there's a clear definition, people still know whether they're happy or not to some degree, and there are behaviors that go with happiness and behaviors that go with sadness.  If the behaviors and the answers line up, you have a pretty good model to work with.

Didn't I just address this in great and very clear detail?

Actually, I have a follow-up question:

Doesn't having a longer, meandering questionnaire for a study present it's own problems, given that only a select few personality types are likely to actually do such a questionnaire (thereby essentially tainting the result by only offering a sampling of a couple of different personalities)?

Hm. My first reaction to seeing this was more along the lines of being offended by what I think was probably implied by the news team than what was actually reported by the study.

I would expect that the study had a very clear definition of what constitutes a "homebody". They probably had some kind of figure indicating that a homebody was someone who spends less than X% of their time socializing, or something like that.

Now I personally would call myself a homebody simply because I especially enjoy being at home. But I actually do quite a bit of socializing. So for me, using the word "homebody" is more about saying HOW MUCH I like being at home rather than HOW OFTEN I am at home not socializing.

So for me, there is trouble afoot in the news team simply saying that "homebodies are less happy." It would have been more fair had they said "People who spend less than X% of their time socializing are less happy." But I'm sure that if they would have state it that way, it wouldn't have sounded quite so much like an interesting discovery or a good news story.

I would say that if you consider yourself a homebody and you feel offended by this because you are very happy, it's probably because you have a very specific definition of homebody that applies to you, whereas the news team was just throwing the word out there all willy-nilly.