About Us

University of JohannesburgAuckland University of Technology

The Gross National Happiness Index

The Gross National Happiness index is the brainchild of Professor Talita Greyling of the University of Johannesburg and Prof Stephanie Rossouw of the Auckland University of Technology, with the technical support of AFSTEREO (Pty) Ltd.  It is the first index of its kind and measures the real-time sentiment of the country. 

The happiness index is constructed by monitoring and extracting the Tweets of South Africans (New Zealanders, Australians) and analysing the sentiment of these Tweets.  A sentiment score is allocated to each Tweet, classifying the Tweet as either negative, neutral or positive.  The sentiment scores are then used in a sentiment balance algorithm, to derive the Gross National Happiness (GNH). The GNH is measured on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being very unhappy and 10 being very happy.

Directors and Staff

Research Director: Prof Talita Greyling  Download CV

Country Director: Prof Stephanie Rossouw Download CV

Data Analyst Fellow: Mr Robert Greyling (BSc Actuarial Science, University of Pretoria)

Technical Partner: AFSTEREO (Pty) Ltd