Importance and Engagement in Happiness-Enhancing Activities of College Students

• In Event: Poster Session 05
  In Poster Session: PS 05 Topic - Health, Growth, Injury

Abstract

This study aimed to examine the intentional happiness-enhancing activities of male and female college students in South Korea. According to the sustainable happiness model (Lyubomisky, Sheldon, & Schkade, 2005), intentional activities are proposed to be the most promising avenue for enhancing happiness and maintaining the gain. The individual's commitment to specific activities might not always match the importance of those activities taken into account for the individual's circumstances in everyday life. Thus, we investigated the individual's both importance and engagement in different types of happiness-enhancing activities. Also, we explored the associations both of the importance and engagement of happiness-enhancing activities with quality of life in college students.
One hundred and forty-two college students (M age = 22.3, SD age = 1.70; 68% female) were recruited from four universities in the metropolitan area of South Korea. Participants rated 44 items of the importance and frequency of engagement in a different type of activities (i.e. goal-focused, recreational, with family and friends, community activities) using the Happiness Enhancing Activities Instrument (Lim, Kim, Jo & Kang, 2016) and responded for 51 items on their quality of life using the Korean version of the WHO Quality of Life Assessment (Min, Kim, & Park, 2002). First, results of mixed ANOVA on importance of activities revealed the significant main effects of gender (F = 7.96, p < .01) and activity type (F = 38.43, p < .001). That is, female students evaluated the importance of happiness-enhancing activities higher than male students. Also, college students evaluated goal-focused, recreational, and with family and friends activities more importantly, compared to community activities. Second, results of mixed ANOVA on the engagement of activities showed the significant main effect of activity type (F = 56.01, p <.001) and interaction effect (F = 3.52, p <.05) between gender and activity type. Following up on the significant interaction effect, female students committed to activities with family and friends more frequently than male students (t = 2.59, p <.05). Third, bivariate correlation coefficients between importance and engagement of four types of activities ranged from .19 to .66. Fourth, regression analyses revealed that the engagement of happiness-enhancing activities (delta R squared = 23%), compared to the importance of activities (delta R squared = 15%), better explained for variance in quality of life after controlling for the effect of gender.
The findings imply a mild to moderate level of discrepancies between the importance and the engagement of specific happiness-enhancing activities. Also, the results suggest that certain types of happiness-enhancing activities considering gender may be better than other types of activities regarding their potential influence on the quality of life in college students.

Authors

• Jungha Lim, Korea University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ohyeon Kwon, Korea University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jinsill Oh, Korea University
  Presenting Author