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Circles of Happiness: Students’ Perceptions of Bidirectional Crossovers of Subjective Well-Being

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Abstract

The mental well-being of the world’s adolescents has decreased in the last 20–30 years. Such a trend is visible also in Sweden, a country otherwise considered a positive example in terms of child well-being. In Sweden, students in lower secondary school are especially exposed. From a salutogenic orientation, this study qualitatively explored 200 Swedish students’ (grades 5–9) perceptions of the role of happiness in school. Students perceived happiness as both promoting and being promoted by five aspects: learning, school engagement, appreciation of subjects or lesson content, others’ happiness, and prosocial behavior. Hence, five perceived bidirectional crossovers of subjective well-being were found. These were compared to the findings of previous research about the determinants and effects of happiness. The students’ perceptions both add new direction for future research and align in several respects with decades of earlier research.

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Notes

  1. The previously described meanings of happiness and subjective well-being and their operationalization (Helliwell et al. 2012, 2013) allow happiness to cover several positive emotions.

  2. School engagement should here be broadly interpreted as including both working devotedly in school and doing homework and quantitative measures, such as increased attendance. However, it does not account for such potential effects of school engagement as actual learning or success in specified school tasks, which are instead encompassed in “Happiness and learning” above.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Happiness Studies for their constructive comments on a previous draft of this paper. I also thank the students who participated and their parents, principals, and teachers for making this study possible. The study is part of the research project “School stinks”… or? Giving voice to children’s and youths’ experiences of psychosocial health in their learning community, supported by the Swedish Research Council (Dnr 2008-5334) and coordinated by Professor Eva Alerby, Luleå University of Technology. The project group designed and performed the data collection, and completely different representations and analyses of the data were presented in two other articles.

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  1. Department of Arts, Communication and Education, Luleå University of Technology, 971 87, Luleå, Sweden

    Ylva Backman

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  1. Ylva Backman
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Correspondence to Ylva Backman.

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The author declares that she has no conflict of interest.

Funding

The study is part of the research project “School stinks”… or? Giving voice to children’s and youths’ experiences of psychosocial health in their learning community, supported by the Swedish Research Council (Dnr 2008-5334) and coordinated by Professor Eva Alerby, Luleå University of Technology.

Research involving human participants

This study involved human participants.

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Informed consent was obtained. The research study was approved by the Regional Ethics Review Board (Dnr 45-2009) in Sweden.

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Backman, Y. Circles of Happiness: Students’ Perceptions of Bidirectional Crossovers of Subjective Well-Being. J Happiness Stud 17, 1547–1563 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-015-9658-0

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