Environmental correlates of wellbeing

In Australia, there is widespread community concern about the wellbeing of adolescents, particularly at the important time of approaching the transition from school to post-school life. However, few studies have focused on the wellbeing of Australian Year 12 students. This paper reports on a study investigating wellbeing among 377 Year 12 students in three public high schools in eastern Australia. The study explored wellbeing in terms of environmental and personality variables and investigated whether the school setting provided environmental elements that enhance adolescent wellbeing in ways similar to those provided by employment for adult wellbeing. The results indicated that school contributed significantly to adolescent wellbeing by providing time structure, access to the wider society, and social contact. Personality variables were found to be significant predictors of life satisfaction and affective wellbeing. The findings have implications for the enhancement of environmental features that may optimise the wellbeing of adolescents at school. Wellbeing in Australian Year 12 students 2 The construct of subjective or psychological wellbeing has received increasing attention in recent years. Going beyond the mere absence of psychopathology, the concept of wellbeing incorporates positive factors and involves optimal psychological functioning and experience. In the psychological literature, subjective wellbeing (SWB) is regarded as a measurement of happiness and satisfaction that may be applied to certain domains or life concerns, such as one’s environment or family, or may involve a focus on satisfaction with life in general, namely, global wellbeing (Diener, 1984). SWB refers to an individual’s evaluation of his or her own life and is considered to be comprised of long-term affective elements, particularly the presence of positive affect and the absence of negative affect, and a cognitive component, life satisfaction (Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999). Distinct domains such as feelings of mastery, autonomy, personal growth, self-acceptance, life purpose, and positive relations, proposed by Ryff and colleagues in their multidimensional model of psychological wellbeing (Ryff, 1995;Ryff & Keyes, 1995;Schmutte & Ryff, 1997), are considered to be important aspects of SWB . Wellbeing and personality There is a growing body of research that strongly implicates personality variables in influencing SWB. In particular, extraversion, which is related to positive affect, and neuroticism, which is related to negative affect, have been most strongly and consistently linked with SWB (Diener & Lucas, 1999;Diener, Oishi, & Lucas, 2003;Diener et al., 1999). For example, in a longitudinal study of young adults, Magnus, Diener, Fujita, and Pavot (1993) found that extraversion predisposed participants to experience more positive objective life events and neuroticism predisposed them to experience more negative objective events. Similarly, Schmutte and Ryff (1997) reported distinctive personality correlates for all six psychological wellbeing measures on their scale measured against the NEO Five Factor Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1991). In their sample of midlife adults, they found that selfacceptance, environmental mastery, and purpose in life were linked negatively to neuroticism and positively to extraversion, and autonomy was linked negatively to neuroticism. Wellbeing in Australian Year 12 students 3 Contribution of employment to wellbeing Unemployment has been shown consistently to be negatively associated with SWB in adults (Fryer, 1986;Jahoda, 1982;Marks & Fleming, 1999;Warr, 1987). However, it appears that the quality of a job and how it satisfies an individual’s needs on certain key attributes is as important to wellbeing as being employed (Warr, 1987, 1999;Winefield, Tiggemann, Winefield, & Goldney, 1993), not only among adults but also among recent school-leavers (Dockery, 2005) and adolescents (Mortimer, Harley, & Staff, 2002). Employment makes a significant contribution to wellbeing not only because of its financial rewards but also because of its social and structured nature (Fryer, 1986;Jahoda, 1984;Warr, 1987). Jahoda and Rush (1980) described five basic categories of psychological experience for which people have an inherent need in order to enjoy wellbeing, all of which are found in work-life: time structure; social contact; collective participation in ventures that make one feel useful and provide a feeling of belonging; social identity and status; and enforced activity. These authors maintained that it is the deprivation of these features that causes unemployment’s negative effect on wellbeing. Jahoda (1982) suggested that the experience of time is shaped by public institutions and that a major impact of unemployment on the individual is the sudden absence of an enforced time structure on one’s day. While people may complain about the often rigid structuring of their time in their working life, its absence can constitute a major psychological burden and contribute to a sense of purposelessness. Long before they enter the world of employment, children and adolescents are subject to the school system structuring their days into a fixed time schedule. While acknowledging the importance of these five categories of experience, Fryer (1986;, 1995) disagreed with Jahoda’s emphasis on employment as a social institution necessary for their existence, and argued for a greater emphasis on the role of personal agency in the wellbeing of unemployed people. Fryer and Payne’s (1984) study of a small group of unemployed people who were not experiencing psychological deprivation found the participants to be adopting proactive behaviours, including active structuring of their time. Fryer (1986, 1995) stressed the importance of personal agency and the ways in which it can be restricted by adverse social Wellbeing in Australian Year 12 students 4 conditions, including those which exist, for many workers, in the labour market. Nevertheless, researchers and theorists have considered Jahoda’s model of categories of experience to be valuable in examining the contribution of employment to wellbeing (Haworth, 1997, 2004; Warr, 1987). As well as providing time structure, employment provides people with contacts and shared experiences with others outside their nuclear family environments. Despite the emphasis placed on individualism in current Western society, the social needs and purposes of life are such that individualism can only be valued when it is embedded in a social context. Employment provides individuals with opportunities to work towards goals and purposes that are beyond the scope of the individual and which demand collectivity (Jahoda, 1982; Jahoda & Rush, 1980). In the same way, situations in the school setting call upon individual students to work together with other students to complete tasks and attain goals that would not be attainable by the individual’s efforts alone. The opportunity for interpersonal contacts, friendships, and social support provided by the work environment has been found to be significantly associated with job satisfaction and overall wellbeing (Hackman & Lawler, 1971;Haworth, 1997;Warr, 1987). As with employment, attending school provides individuals with interpersonal contacts that enlarge their social horizon, allow social comparison, and provide social support. School provides adolescents with a peer group that becomes increasingly important as they spend greater amounts of time with their peers and correspondingly less time with their parents (Steinberg, 2002). An adolescent’s peer group is an important reference point that supports independence by accommodating the need for identity and recognition and providing opportunities for the development of social skills and strategies needed in adulthood (Coleman & Hendry, 1990). Further, good peer relationships provide a buffer against stress and protect adolescents from isolation and loneliness (Erwin, 1998). The role of social connectedness in adolescents’ emotional wellbeing and the importance of enhancing this aspect of the school environment has been a focus of a recent Australian research project, the Centre for Adolescent Health’s Gatehouse Project (Glover, Burns, Butler, & Patton, 1998;Glover & Butler, 2004). Wellbeing in Australian Year 12 students 5 Warr’s model of wellbeing Warr (1987) proposed a model of wellbeing derived from an integration of Jahoda’s (1982) five categories of psychological experience and Fryer’s (1986, 1995) principle of personal agency. Warr identified nine environmental features, which he called Principal Environmental Influences (PEIs), considered to act in conjunction with personal factors to influence wellbeing and mental health. These PEIs are opportunity for control, opportunity for skill use, variety, environmental clarity, externally generated goals, availability of money, physical security, opportunity for interpersonal contact, and valued social position. Strong associations have been found between each of the PEIs and established measures of mental health (Haworth, 1997). Warr’s model includes affective wellbeing, considered along three principal axes: a pleasure dimension, covering a range of feelings from contented to discontented; an anxiety dimension, ranging from anxious to comfortable; and a depression-enthusiasm dimension. Warr’s model has proven useful in the study of the impact of different environments on wellbeing and mental health. In particular, it is applicable to, and has empirical support in, the environments of employment and unemployment (Haworth, 1997, 2004;Warr, 1987, 1999). It also provides a systematic framework for examining other environments such as family life and retirement (Warr, 1987). As in most wellbeing research, the model has been applied to adult samples. It is not known whether the model is useful for explaining wellbeing among adolescents at school. While young peopl