Seeing Is Believing: Making Wellbeing More Tangible.

Positive Psychology has been instrumental in promoting wellbeing science in the modern era. However, there are still ways in which positive psychology interventions and positive education programmes can be improved to achieve more robust and sustained effects. One suggested method is to make wellbeing more salient and tangible through the use of objective tools that assess the relationship between psychological and physiological wellbeing, and enable wellbeing status and change to be seen. With the addition of an interdisciplinary team, as well as technology-enabled and pedagogically sound learning tools and approaches, the potential for positive outcomes and impact increases exponentially. Monitoring wellbeing progress in this way can provide evidence, motivation and belief in positive psychology and wellbeing interventions. This can lead to engaged learning, sustained benefits and systemic impact. Positive psychology needs to strategically extend on the emerging work in this field to help everyone, including policy makers, notice and value wellbeing.

Examining the processes and effects of an exemplar school-based well-being approach on student competency, autonomy and relatedness.

As the application of positive education becomes more prevalent in schools, the importance of gathering information on optimal processes and outcomes associated with the programs, increases. The fulfillment of psychological needs such as competence, relatedness and autonomy, have seldomly been explored, yet they seem inextricably linked with well-being. It is also important to examine program qualities relating to delivery, relevance and practice opportunities. The current study examines (i) psychological need satisfaction as an outcome, using a quasi-experimental design and (ii) the processes involved in program delivery, using an explanatory sequential design. Year 9 students participating in the Geelong Grammar School (GGS) Timbertop well-being experience in Australia (n = 119) and 79 best matched well-being as usual (WBAU) students completed a psychological need satisfaction survey. A subgroup of 46 students also participated in focus groups. Mixed design analyses of variance indicated that the Timbertop Positive Education students experienced improved competence, relatedness and autonomy after the school year compared with 'WBAU' students. Findings from student focus groups also support the importance of well sequenced, active, focused and explicit learning processes for program success. This study provides support for building psychological need satisfaction with a positive education program that adopts practical, interactive and goal-oriented well-being learnings. This is encouraging and supports a context adapted replication and evaluation of the general Positive Education approach adopted by GGS in other schools.

Development and feasibility of a mobile experience sampling application for tracking program implementation in youth well-being programs.

Well-being program evaluations mostly focus on identifying effective outcomes rather than measuring the actual extent to which program participants may apply learned skills in subsequent everyday lives. This study examined the feasibility of using a newly developed mobile experience sampling app called Wuzzup to study program implementation in young people participating in well-being programs. Ninety-six participants (60 females; 36 males) between the ages of 13 and 15 years (M = 13.87, SD = 0.71) were recruited to respond to two random prompts each day, for 7 days, at each of the three data collection time-points. Responses from 69 participants (72 % of initial sample) that met study criteria were retained for analysis. The average response rate was 92.89 %, with an average of 85.92 s to complete each ESM survey. Significant associations between first and second halves of the ESM week, and their respective positive affect and negative affect survey responses, demonstrate internal reliability and construct validity of the Wuzzup app to capture momentary affect and activation states of young people. This study also demonstrated the feasibility and practical utility of the Wuzzup app to profile and track an individual's learning over time.

Rasch analysis of the Meaning in Life Questionnaire among adults from South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

BACKGROUND: Meaning in life is a key indicator of subjective well-being and quality of life. Further developments in understanding and enhancing the construct will depend inter alia on the sound measurement thereof. This study is at the forefront of applying modern psychometric techniques to the Meaning in Life Questionnaire, a scale widely used to assess meaning in life. METHOD: The Rasch rating scale model was applied to the Presence and Search subscales of the Meaning in Life Questionnaire using a sample of 601 adults from South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. RESULTS: The Presence subscale was insensitive at high levels of presence of meaning while the majority of the respondents fell in that range. Removal of item 9 ("My life has no clear purpose") and collapsing the response categories indicative of low and medium levels of the latent construct significantly improved the subscale's targeting and fit to the Rasch model, resulting in a subscale that exhibited differential item functioning on items 1 ("I understand my life's meaning"), 4 ("My life has a clear sense of purpose"), and 5 ("I have a good sense of what makes my life meaningful") for country, but none for gender, age group, or education level. The Search subscale yielded disordered category threshold calibrations, but after collapsing some of the response categories representing low and medium levels of the target construct, a subscale that demonstrated good fit to the Rasch model, good targeting, and no differential item functioning resulted. CONCLUSIONS: In terms of this particular scale, adaptation of the rating scale and removal of item 9 is recommended. Country-level parameter estimates may be needed for items that exhibited differential item functioning. The study also has significant implications for the theory, measurement, and practice of meaning in and quality of life in general. Reasons for and the far-reaching implications of the insensitivity of the Presence subscale for high levels of presence of meaning on, for example, the correlation between meaning in life and indicators of health are contemplated. Further investigation of the construct's nature and measurement, especially at high levels, is indicated.

Adolescent resilience: a concept analysis.

There is need for greater clarity around the concept of resilience as it relates to the period of adolescence. Literature on resilience published between 1990 and 2000 and relevant to adolescents aged between 12- and 18-years of age was reviewed with the aim of examining the various uses of the term, and commenting on how specific ways of conceptualizing of resilience may help develop new research agendas in the field. By bringing together ideas on resilience from a variety of research and clinical perspectives, the purpose of the review is to explicate core elements of resilience in more precise ways, in the hope that greater conceptual clarity will lead to a range of tailored interventions that benefit young people.