Personal well-being of children and adolescents: psychosocial correlates of happiness and life satisfaction

Objectives. The study comprehensively analyzes selected demographic, personality and contextual factors and their role in relation to the subjective evaluation of feelings of happiness and satisfaction in 1,975 children/adolescents aged 10-18. Methods. The research sample was compiled in primary and secondary schools, facilities for protective and institutional education, diagnostic institutes as well as children's homes and asylum shelters in the Czech Republic. Happiness and overall life satisfaction were assessed using the Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS; Lyubomirsky & Lepper, 1999) along with the Student's Life Satisfaction Scale (SLSS; Huebner, 1991). Data collection was carried out by the completion of online questionnaires in 2020 before the onset of the covid-19 pandemic. Results. Multiple linear regression analysis showed that happiness and satisfaction tended to decline in middle and late adolescence. Lower levels of happiness and satisfaction were also found among those who had experienced growing up at home in a single-parent family or in an institutional setting, who considered the enviromnent in which they grew up to be dangerous and dull, who did not feel accepted by the caregiver and who self-evaluated as "choleric" and "melancholy." Conclusions. The respondents' subjective evaluation of their own temperament along with the feeling of acceptance by the caring person contributed most to the prediction of happiness and satisfaction. Very weak effects were found with respect to gender and spirituality. The adaptation and psychometric analysis of the SHS and SLSS carried out in this study showed that the Czech versions of both instruments can be considered valid and reliable to identify happiness and satisfaction in a given population of adolescents. Study limitations. The limitations relate to the cross-sectional design of the research as well as the fact that the sample was not representative. The psychosocial data, i.e. assessments of temperament, spirituality and the feeling of acceptance by the caregiver, were obtained from the young people's subjective statements through single-item scales.