Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Family Studies and Human Services / Farrell J. Webb / The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between chronic stressors-believed to be a condition present by race, sex, and social class and Well-being when mediated by individual resources and perceptions. Additionally, this study examined the utility of the proposed ABC-WB Model of Well-Being adapted from the ABC-X Model. The data used in this dissertation were gleaned from the 2004 General Social Survey which contained a weighted sample of 3,260 respondents. Several observed indicators were used to define each of the latent constructs corresponding to theoretical variables of the ABC-WB model. Each of these constructs contributed to the overall model in some way despite some inconsistent findings. The utility of the model was examined with multiple indicators for Stressor. None of the four research hypotheses were supported by the tested models. The data models were then respecified. This process did not produce any working structural models as well. Nevertheless, the findings revealed that well-being was an important factor to consider in the ABC-WB model. Despite the shortcomings of the model the stressor measurement revealed a direct but mild relationship with well-being. In all the models, Stressor was tempered by Resources and Perceptions both of which had a strong relationship with well-being. The selected models suggested that despite the lack of fit, largely to do with data restrictions rather than model specificity, the overall ABC-WB model has research potential.

Youth psychological well-being has become increasingly acknowledged as not merely the absence of psychological distress, but the presence of positive indicators of optimal functioning. Students with complete mental health (i.e., low psychopathology and high well-being) demonstrate the best academic, social, and physical health outcomes. As such, there remains a need to address children’s well-being through a holistic approach emphasizing the prevention of mental health problems and promotion of flourishing. Positive psychology interventions (PPIs) have emerged as a promising method of enhancing students’ complete mental health. Previous investigations support the utility of multitarget PPIs with middle school students and single-target PPIs (e.g., character strengths, hope) with younger elementary students, though the extent to which comprehensive multitarget, multicomponent PPIs enhance classes of elementary students’ outcomes relative to a control has not been examined. This study compared levels of subjective well-being, mental health problems, classroom social support, and classroom engagement between students in 6 classrooms randomly assigned to participate in a 10-week intervention targeting a variety of positive psychological constructs (i.e., positive relationships, gratitude, kindness, character strengths, hope) with parent and teacher components, and students in 7 classrooms randomly assigned to a delayed intervention control group. Follow-up analyses examined levels of outcomes of the immediate intervention group relative to the control group at post-intervention, as well as levels of outcomes in the intervention group three months after program completion. At post-intervention, classes of students participating in the immediate intervention group did not have significantly improved student-reported life satisfaction, positive affect or negative affect, classmate or teacher support, emotional or behavioral engagement, nor teacher-reported relationship satisfaction, instrumental help, and emotional or behavioral engagement relative to the control classes. However, several trends were found: (a) students in the immediate intervention group had lower negative affect relative to the delayed intervention control among students with greater baseline negative affect levels, (b) students in the immediate intervention group had lower teacher-reported levels of instrumental help relative to the control among students with greater baseline instrumental help levels, and (c) students in the immediate intervention group reported lower levels of behavioral engagement relative to the delayed intervention control. Because of the lack of improvement in immediate intervention group outcomes relative to the control group at post-intervention, continuation of those anticipated improvements from post-intervention to 3-month follow-up could not be detected. However, there was a significant increase in teacher-reported internalizing symptoms from post-intervention to follow-up among the immediate intervention group (without comparison to a control). Overall, findings from this study do not provide empirical support for the efficacy of a multitarget, multicomponent PPI when delivered universally to classes of elementary students. Nevertheless, high levels of treatment acceptability and feasibility from students and teachers as well as limitations to the study design support the need for educational scholars and practitioners to continue exploring the impact of multitarget PPIs delivered to students in multiple formats and various age levels in order to promote complete mental health across tiers of support and thus optimize success for all students.

Background: There is a considerable body of research linking child well-being with future outcomes for children. In recent years monitoring and promoting child well-being has been high on the UK government agenda and has attracted a great deal of theoretical interest. Despite existing research and given the importance of a precise definition, there remains a lack of knowledge about what well-being actually means to children. An independent literature search highlighted that while researchers have made some effort to understand what well-being means to children there are still significant gaps in the literature, including an understanding of how children’s views of well-being vary across different age groups. Participants: Nine participants were selected from three different age groups (four, seven and eleven year olds). The sample included a mix of males and females and all participants were reported to have adequate language skills and none were identified as having special educational needs. Method: This is a purely qualitative study utilising an in depth survey research design. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with each child and each participant was asked to take photographs of and describe artifacts which they considered to be important to their well-being. Analysis/Findings: Data were analysed using thematic analysis. Data analysis was conducted in discrete data sets defined by age group. Then compared across age groups to gain understanding of how children’s views of well-being develop with age. Well-being appeared to be conceptualised as an evaluative judgement which was influenced by well-being domains/factors and emotional experience. The complexity of the children’s evaluative judgements appeared to become increasingly sophisticated with age. The four year olds were found to understand well-being in egocentric terms whereas the seven and eleven year olds seemed to understand well-being in terms of both their own experiences and the experiences of the perceived other. Two specific developmental considerations were identified which influenced the children’s evaluative judgements including individual difference and children’s views regarding their ideal life. In addition to this, the component ‘self-view’ was identified for the eleven year olds. Three domains of well-being were identified which included: ‘my relationships’, ‘my lifestyle and ‘myself’ and the individual factors relating to these domains appeared to vary and increase in complexity with age. The generalisability of these finding is critically considered within the limitations of the research design. Conclusion/Implications: The findings led to the development of an exploratory developmental model of child well-being. Suggestions are made for future research and potential implications for practice are considered.

Social media surveillance is becoming more and more popular. However, current surveillance methods do not utilize well-respected surveys, which were established over many decades in domains outside of computer science. Also the evaluation of the previous social media surveillance is not sufficient, especially for surveillance of happiness on social media. These motivated us to develop a general computational methodology for translating a well-known survey into a social media surveillance strategy. Therefore, traditional surveys could be utilized to broaden social media surveillance. The methodology could bridge domains like psychology and social science with computer science. We use life satisfaction on social media as a case study to illustrate our survey-to-surveillance methodology. We start with a famous life satisfaction survey, expand the survey statements to generate templates. Then we use the templates to build queries in our information retrieval system to retrieve the social media posts which could be considered as valid responses to the original survey. Filters were utilized to boost the performance of the retrieval system of our surveillance method. To evaluate our surveillance method, we developed a novel method to build the gold standard dataset. Instead of evaluating all the data instances like the traditional way, we ask human workers to "find'' as many of the positives as possible in the dataset, the rest are assumed to be negatives. We used the method to build the gold standard dataset for the life satisfaction case study. We also build three more gold standard datasets to further demonstrate the value of our method. Using the life satisfaction gold standard dataset, we show that performance of our surveillance method of life satisfaction outperforms other popular methods (lexicon and machine learning based methods) used by previous researchers. Using our surveillance method of life satisfaction on social media, we did a comprehensive analysis of life satisfaction expressions on Twitter. We not only show the time series, daily and weekly cycle of life satisfaction on social media, but also found the differences in characteristics for users with different life satisfaction expressions. These include psychosocial features such as anxiety, anger and depression. In addition, we present the geographic distribution of life satisfaction, including the life satisfaction across the U.S. and places around the world. This thesis is the first to systematically explore life satisfaction expressions over Twitter. This is done using computational methods that derive from an established survey on life satisfaction.

This study examined the contribution of several variables to the prediction of perceived freedom in leisure (PFL) and life satisfaction in older adults. Demographic, health and socioeconomic variables were compared with participation in recreation programs, church involvement and PFL. Church involvement was viewed as a leisure activity rather than a measure of religiosity. The survey instrument incorporated all these variables and was pretested and revised before use in the study. The sample consisted of 198 persons 60 years of age and older who were members of two Southern Baptist churches. Subjects were randomly selected, but persons considered by church staff members to be incapable of completing the survey were eliminated. Surveys were hand delivered and picked up by volunteer workers, and a 38 percent return rate was obtained. Alpha reliability for the church involvement, PFL and life satisfaction scales in the instrument were .87, .94, and .77, respectively. Frequency counts and percentages or means and standard deviations were calculated for the demographic variables. Subjects were categorized by level of involvement in church and community recreation programs. Persons involved in community but not church recreation programs were underrepresented in the sample. A selective sampling procedure was utilized to obtain more respondents in this category, but the data from these individuals were analyzed separately. Stepwise multiple regression analyses were utilized to ascertain the impact of different variables upon PFL and life satisfaction. Three predictors of PFL emerged— participation in recreation programs, church involvement and satisfaction with health. Correlations between these variables and life satisfaction were consistent with the findings in the literature. Inclusion of church involvement, participation in recreation programs and, for the life satisfaction analysis, PFL raised the percentage of variance explained. Thus, greater predictive power emerged using these variables than when only demographic, health and socioeconomic variables were included.

Thesis advisor: David L. Blustein / The U.S. has witnessed growing inequality, decreasing wages, and increasing instability in work over the past several decades (Krugman, 2012; Stiglitz, 2015). Moreover, evidence demonstrating work’s impact on well-being is expansive, as is its role in upward mobility and maintaining systemic oppression (Blustein, 2006; 2008; Swanson, 2012). Despite this breadth of research, studies rarely attend to community factors that shape opportunity for accessing work. As such, the present study sought to better understand relationships among individuals’ economic resources and work-related psychological constructs, in conjunction with community economic conditions and access to decent work. The present study utilized latent structural equation modeling to test several hypothesized tenets of the Psychology of Working Theory (Duffy et al., 2016) involving the latent constructs of social class, work volition, decent work and life satisfaction, in a sample of 816 working adults. Modeling contained both a composite decent work (DW) factor and its five discrete components of DW: safe working conditions, adequate compensation, access to healthcare, adequate rest and free time, and a match of organizational and social/family values (Duffy et al., 2017). Moderation analyses relied on matching individual participant data to their county-specific opportunity data, such as poverty, unemployment, and Preschool enrollment rates. Results indicated that social class indirectly predicted DW through work volition and that DW subsequently predicted life satisfaction. When examining distinct DW components in tandem with a global construct, social class predicted the healthcare and rest/time off components of DW, which further attests to the unique variance in these components. Findings underscore the powerful role economic resources play in securing DW and shaping people’s work conditions, in addition to the clear impact of DW on overall well-being. Analyses did not yield significant moderation effects for economic conditions and community opportunity in hypothesized pathways. Implications for research, practice and policy, as well as study limitations are presented. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology.

The presented thesis deals with precieved quality of life among university students, specifically with satisfaction and factors that influence it in subjective evaluation. The aim of the diploma thesis is to find out how the students of the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice evaluate their quality of life. The research was carried out using the SEIQoL method and a semi-structured interview was chosen as an additional method. The criteria for choosing the respondents was intentional, in this case students of bachelor study of the Faculty of Education, specialization Health Education. The thesis is divided into theoretical and practical part. The theoretical part of the thesis deals mainly with the quality of life, happiness and well-being. The thesis briefly describes the lifestyle and young adulthood period and its characteristics. The practically oriented part is devoted to the research. The resulting data point to the fact that students evaluate their lives positively. The average quality of life index of these students is 72.8 % and the overall satisfaction rating is 72.6 %. From interviews with students I found out which of these life goals are important for the respondents. Respondents mentioned health and healthy lifestyle as the most important goal. All respondents mentioned...

Magister Artium (Psychology) - MA(Psych) / Research on children’s well-being has increased over the past decade, largely driven by advancements in children’s rights legislation and the emergence of innovative theoretical and epistemological frameworks. While there has been a notable increase in empirical research on children’s objective standards of living, less data has been available in relation to their subjective perceptions and evaluations of their life. The measurement of children’s subjective well-being (SWB) has been a particular focus of empirical research especially as it relates to the development of valid scales for use with children across age groups and contexts. An area of concern is the lack of psychometrically sound measurement instruments for use with younger children and especially in low-to-middle income contexts.

El objetivo del presente estudio consistió en identificar la relación entre la satisfacción con la vida y rol de género femenino en mujeres que trabajan en una entidad bancaria. Se utilizó un modelo cuantitativo, no experimental de tipo correlacional en una muestra conformada por 154 mujeres entre los 18 y 56 años que se encontraban contratadas y laborando en la agencia seleccionada de la entidad bancaria. Se utilizó la Escala de satisfacción con la vida de Pavot y Diener (1993), versión traducida al español por Atienza et al. (2000). Además del Inventario de roles sexuales de Sandra Bem (1971), versión traducida por Raguz en 1991. Los resultados demostraron que existe una relación entre ambas variables, pero no significativa. Se discuten los resultados desde las implicancias de la psicología positiva. / The objective of the present study was to identify the relationship between satisfaction with life and the role of women working in a bank. This investigation used a quantitative, correlative and non-experimental model. The sample was made by 154 women between 18 and 56 years old who were hired and working in the selected agency of the bank. The Satisfaction with Life Scale of Pavot and Diener (1993), translated version into Spanish by Atienza et al. (2000), and the Inventory of Sexual Roles of Sandra Bem (1971), translated version by Raguz in 1991 were used. The results showed that there is a relationship between both variables, but not significant. The results are discussed from the implications of positive psychology. / Tesis

Theoretical part of the thesis deals with the concept of well-being and life-span psychology. Classification of the concept of well-being with regard to related terms is presented, as well as main theoretical and analytical approaches to this topic. Several chapters are dedicated to analyzing results of existing research that investigates the relationship between well-being and important variables. The part dedicated to life-span psychology contains, in addition to a definition of the subject, several significant theories and subsequent field of successful development. Empirical part of the thesis concentrates mainly on relationship between life satisfaction and specific life course, particularly career stability and relationship stability. Relationships are examined with the help of combined data of participants in Brno longitudinal study on life-span development (N=78) and newly approached subjects (N=35). The empirical part continues with examination of relationship of successful development, which is operationalized into composite score with personality dimensions within five- factorial personality model and socio-cognitive variables of self-concept clarity, self-efficacy and self-esteem. A significant correlation was found only in those relationships between satisfaction with life and selected...