Qriously measures sentiment on smartphones

Inspired in part by Jon Hendren‘s nauseating I’m-ashamed-of-being-a-human collation of tweets describing people’s disappointment with their Christmas gifts (check out the Daily Mail article), we decided to see if we could find a meaningful correlation between ‘degree of satisfaction with Christmas gifts’ and per capita income. We used this Wikipedia article for our data on per capita income of various counties in California.

Satisfaction with Christmas Gifts vs Per Capita Income in California

Satisfaction was determined by asking the question “Satisfied with your Christmas gifts? Not at all vs. Totally”

The correlation is admittedly low (the R² value denotes the degree of correlation where 1 = perfect correlation and 0 = data is totally linearly unrelated. This data set has an R² value of 0.11), but because it’s just so deliciously tempting to believe that rich kids have miserable Christmases we believe further exploration is warranted.

What do you think, should we disregard this as apophenia or dig deeper?