Character Strengths And Wellbeing In Senior High School Students And Their Teachers In Ghana

Character strengths are positive personal traits that are proposed to be critical for lifelong optimal human development.The relative prevalence of the Values in Action(VIA)Character Strengths among senior high school students and teachers,their relations with wellbeing and their structure have received little empirical investigation.This thesis investigated the relative prevalence of the VIA Character Strengths of Peterson and Seligman(2004),their relations with subjective wellbeing measures as well as their factor structure.Senior High school students(N = 600,aged 17-22)and teachers(N= 240,aged 23-46)completed a questionnaire package in a survey.Students completed the VIA-Youth 96 and subjective wellbeing measures(satisfaction with life and school,Positive Affect,Depression)and teachers completed the VIA-72 and different subjective wellbeing measures relevant to them(Subjective Happiness,Job Satisfaction,Fatigue at work).Students' top 7 most endorsed strengths were spirituality,kindness,love of learning,teamwork,judgment,bravery and hope.The lesser reported strengths were honesty,self-regulation,humility and social intelligence.Teachers' top 7 strengths were hope,fairness;honesty,gratitude,teamwork,leadership and perseverance,and the lesser were love of learning,humility and self-regulation.The top 7 strengths for male students were similar to that of their female counterparts and that of male teachers were similar to that of female teachers.However,female students scored significantly higher in 17 of the strengths.Among the students,all character strengths were positively associated with satisfaction with life and school(SWLS)and positive affect and 16 out of the 24 strengths negatively correlated with depressive symptoms.Among the teachers,three strengths(curiosity,gratitude,zest)positively correlated with subjective happiness;love positively correlated with job satisfaction and bravery and self-regulation negatively correlated with fatigue at work.Exploratory factor analysis and Principal Component analysis suggest that the VIA-Youth 96 is undimensional as a single factor named Global positivity factor(GPF)was obtained and this factor promoted subjective wellbeing in the students.Thus,the theoretically proposed multi-dimensional virtue cluster model of character strengths was not supported in the VIA-Youth 96.However,a four-factor dimension named Fortitude,Transcendence,Vitality and Cognitive strengths were obtained for the VIA-72 for adults.The Transcendence and Vitality factors were strongly associated with subjective happiness while Transcendence and Cognitive factors were weakly associated with job satisfaction.Implications for research and practice are discussed.