Abstract

There is a growing interest in psychology and social sciences to study happiness. Studies are predominantly of positivist epistemology where the concept typically is charged -ethic-extensively, ignoring the meaning of happiness to people. To unravel this, an observational, descriptive, transversal study of phenomenographic approach and the corresponding method -emic- are reported here. A non-random sample of faculty and personal staff of a University consisting of 164 Chilean adults of both sexes responded voluntarily and anonymously to a brief survey about happiness and their responses were categorized and graphed respectively, with the help of the NVivo and Campstools programs. It was obtained that happiness has a structure of meanings made up of five conceptions: state, have, achievement, be, well-being which are described, and from which a definition of happiness is proposed and finally, a suggestion on how to continue research in this area