Inna R. Edara and Haw-Lin Wu
Impact of Positive Psychology Education and Interventions on WellBeing A Study of Students Engaged in Pastoral Care
546 - 557
2018
12
4
International Journal of Educational and Pedagogical Sciences
https://publications.waset.org/pdf/10008976
https://publications.waset.org/vol/136
World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology
Positive psychology investigates human strengths and virtues and promotes wellbeing. Relying on this assumption, positive interventions have been continuously designed to build pleasure and happiness, joy and contentment, engagement and meaning, hope and optimism, satisfaction and gratitude, spirituality, and various other positive measures of wellbeing. In line with this model of positive psychology and interventions, this study investigated certain measures of wellbeing in a group of 45 students enrolled in an 18week positive psychology course and simultaneously engaged in serviceoriented interventions that they chose for themselves based on the course content and individual interests. Students’ wellbeing was measured at the beginning and end of the course. The wellbeing indicators included positive automatic thoughts, optimism and hope, satisfaction with life, and spirituality. A pairedsamples ttest conducted to evaluate the impact of class content and serviceoriented interventions on students’ scores of wellbeing indicators indicated statistically significant increase from preclass to postclass scores. There were also significant gender differences in postcourse wellbeing scores, with females having higher levels of wellbeing than males. A twoway between groups analysis of variance indicated a significant interaction effect of age by gender on the postcourse wellbeing scores, with females in the age group of 5665 having the highest scores of wellbeing in comparison to the males in the same age group. Regression analyses indicated that positive automatic thought significantly predicted hope and satisfaction with life in the precourse analysis. In the postcourse regression analysis, spiritual transcendence made a significant contribution to optimism, and positive automatic thought made a significant contribution to both hope and satisfaction with life. Finally, a significant test between precourse and postcourse regression coefficients indicated that the regression coefficients at precourse were significantly different from postcourse coefficients, suggesting that the positive psychology course and the interventions were helpful in raising the levels of wellbeing. The overall results suggest a substantial increase in the participants’ wellbeing scores after engaging in the positiveoriented interventions, implying a need for designing more positive interventions in education to promote wellbeing.
Open Science Index 136, 2018