A culturally responsive interactionist model of aggregate subjective well-being for Hong Kong primary school children

Abstract

This research tested an interactionist explanatory model of aggregate subjective wellbeing (SWB) among Hong Kong primary school students. Fostering positive SWB during childhood has been shown to have developmental benefits and embraces a holistic and strength-based approach as advocated in positive psychology and education. Understanding the pathways through which person-environment-agency factors associate with SWB and its components thus helps better meet those childhood developmental needs but also allows for the methodical comparison of the theoretical significance of each given dimension. Hedonic SWB (life satisfaction and affect) is often presented as the definitive articulation of SWB. However, hedonic SWB may not entirely capture the essence of SWB in Confucian Heritage Cultures. In the present research, eudaimonic well-being (EWB) was included as a complementary component within a four-factor aggregate model as a culturally responsive measure. SWB research has also tended to under-utilise interactionist paradigms, with bottom-up and top-down approaches being used in isolation. By using both approaches, this research observed the distinctive ways in which external, internal, and agentic factors interacted and contributed to the different components of SWB. Lastly, primary school settings are often overlooked, and children underrepresented in SWB research, hence the reason for which both were selected for this research. The research employed a two-stage quantitative survey-based method. The exploratory pilot study, whose sample included 580 upper primary school students, tested the psychometric properties of the inventories to be used in the main study and the validity of the framework. The confirmatory main study included 1247 Hong Kong upper primary students from 12 schools. As hypothesised, a quadripartite structure to SWB was confirmed, which included hedonic and eudaimonic aspects of SWB, and englobed cognitive and affective components, and a higher-order aggregate SWB factor materialised. EWB was the component that best predicted aggregate SWB, fulfilling its hypothesised culturally responsive role. Moreover, explanatory models that examined EWB in isolation proved the best fitted and accounted for the largest amounts of variance of all models tested. As expected, determinants of SWB behaved differently according to a cognitive-affective dichotomy of SWB. Top-down internal factors (personality traits) proved most significant in explaining affect. In addition to the customarily significant extraversion and neuroticism personality traits, conscientiousness was also a key determinant of SWB, suggesting a cultural dimension to the associations. By contrast, bottom-up external factors (perceptions of schooling environments) proved most significant when explaining cognitive SWB. Among those, peer relations was a ubiquitous predictor of both affective and cognitive SWB outcomes, signalling how critical the need for belongingness is in forming children’s SWB. Satisfaction with school life exhibited strong associations with life satisfaction, demonstrating the pertinence of life domain evaluations and the centrality of school experiences to SWB. Lastly, agentic factors (approaches to learning) mediated many variables within the framework. The deep approach to learning was especially predictive of positive SWB, whereas the opposite held true for the surface approach, supporting the threefold categorisation of intellectual styles. These findings have scientific implications for research on quality-of-life, positive psychology, and on intellectual styles through the improved understanding of how person-environment- agency interactions explained different pathways to specific components of SWB within a culturally responsive four-factor model of aggregate SWB. The resultant understandings of how mental health articulates itself within school-age children contribute to better attuned psycho-social indicators that can inform educational planning and design.