Study On The Relationship Between Older Adults' Participation In Learning Activity And Subjective Well-being

As society is increasingly ageing, the lives of older people are appearing more and more highlighted, especially the problem of subjective well-being of the older has become a hot topic for researchers of social science.Researches studying subjective well-being of older adults in the past, no matter from the perspective of quality of life, or of the whole development of human beings, are focused on two aspects: one is to present and describe the state of subjective well-being of older adults, the other is to find out various factors that have effect on subjective well-being. It is no doubt that these researches indeed offer us abundant empirical information and theories based on such experiments.In learning society, education for older adults is thriving all over the world, myriad of older people with increasingly higher enthusiasm are participating in learning activity, which, as matter of fact, to a large extent help to promote their subjective well-being. Although studies on older adult learning is fruitful, there is still a lack of research on the relations between learning and subjective well-being. Therefore, the writer tried to base her thesis upon the study of the relations between older adults' participating in learning activity and subjective well-being.This study aims at displaying the state of older adults' participating in learning activity and of their subjective well-being, portraying features of subjective well-being of the participants, and demonstrating the significant positive correlation between participating in learning activity and subjective well-being.The thesis contains six chapters.Chapter One is preface. The writer made clear of the background and significance of the study.Chapter Two is definitions of the key words. The writer defined four keywords such as "older adult", "subjective well-being", "learning" and "participating in learning activity" from philosophical, psychological and sociological perspectives, and tried to establish the relation between learning and subjective well-being on the basis of philosophy, thereby proposed the argumentation of the thesis.Chapter Three is research literature review. The writer expatiated the phases and achievements of both western and eastern studies on subjective well-being and on participating in learning activity of older adults, reviewed some relative mature theories, and made some opinions of her own, which paved the way for chapter four.Chapter Four is the study design. The writer illuminated the purposes, content and hypotheses of the study, and expounded study method and the process of questionnaire's design and its implementation.Chapter Five is presentation of the study results. The writer generalized the results as follows:1. The demographic features of the participants are: the number of the young-old population( whose age is between 55 and 75, according to Neugarten) is larger than that of the old-old; female elders are more than male ones; most of the participants (subjects) are living with spouse; their educational degree tends to be high, while their economical income are at average level.2. The present state of participating in learning activity of the participants is: they all regard lifelong learning very important; their goals of learning are clear, enthusiasm is high, motives are relatively strong, and attitude is positive which reflects their readiness for meeting challenges; they are very confident in their abilities and preoccupied with activities in which they are participating, and they can make self actualization to a high degree; the participants are satisfied with their teacher, and with good relations between teacher and learner, and between learners themselves.3. The features of subjective well-being of the participants are: they believe that the prospect of society is bright, that they themselves are stepping forwards and making greater progress, that they have definite goals in life and have harmonious family life. Generally speaking, they are enjoying very high subjective well-being.4. Participating in learning activity do positively correlate with subjective well-being. In details, there are six inner elements of participating in learning activity, such as the participants' interest in activity, their achievement motivation, to what degree they can meet their challenges, to what degree they can concentrate in activity, to what degree they are able to actualize, and the quality of learning atmosphere they perceive. Each of the six elements has significant positive correlation with general subjective well-being. The study also found that the external elements of participating in learning activity, such as the length of learning, the number of courses and organizational form of learning appeared no significant correlation with subjective well-being.Chapter Six is analysis and discussion. The writer explained why the participants got high scores in subjective well-being test, and analyzed the reasons of the significant correlation between six inner elements of participating in learning activity and subjective well-being, thereby some suggestions were proposed accordingly. At last the writer pointed out the limitation of the thesis.