Need, affect and satisfaction: An investigation into the domains of work, leisure, family and community

The purpose of this study was to pursue a "bottom-up" approach to satisfaction in order to understand the underlying dimensions that inform individuals' satisfaction judgements, particularly as related to the work, leisure, family and community domains, as well as life overall. Need gratification and affective experience within each of these domains were conceptualised as underlying dimensions of domain satisfaction judgements, which, in turn, were seen to inform life satisfaction judgements.; Need gratification scores were obtained through a modification of the scale used by Omodei and Wearing (1991). In addition to these "raw" scores, need gratification scores were combined with expressed need importance measures in order to evaluate the utility of such "personally-weighted" measures in modeling intra-domain relationships. Affect was assessed through an expanded version of the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (Watson, Clark & Tellegen, 1988). Domain and life satisfaction scores were obtained via a modified version of the Extended Satisfaction With Life Scale (Alfonso, 1995). Domain centrality scores were obtained via scales based upon the Salience Inventory (Nevill & Super, 1984) and the Meaning of Work Survey C (England, Quintanilla & Maimer, 1995), and these scores were used to weight domain satisfaction scores for the purposes of modeling relationships with life satisfaction. Data were obtained from 242 staff employed at Canadian university.; Results indicate that, across the majority of domains, hypothesized relationships were supported by the data. Need gratification was positively related to positive affect and negatively related to negative affect, and positive affect was positively related, and negative affect negatively related, to domain satisfaction. The strongest relationships found were generally between need gratification and positive affect and positive affect and domain satisfaction. Models that included the personally-weighted need gratification and domain satisfaction measures, however, were less able than models including the raw scores to explain variations in domain and life-satisfaction respectively. These measures typically had lower predictive power than unweighted scores, and models that contained them fit to the data worse than models that included raw scores. Although illuminating measures in their own right, need importance and domain centrality measures are not fruitfully combined with their associated gratification or satisfaction scores for the purposes of modelling relationships, and the use of such combined variables in future research seems unwarranted.; Multiple regression analysis indicated that all domain satisfaction scores were statistically significant predictors of life satisfaction, with family satisfaction the most potent (beta = .447) followed by work (beta = .355), leisure beta = .240) and community beta = .131). However, hierarchical regression analyses indicated that community satisfaction is an insignificant predictor of life satisfaction once the other domain satisfaction measures had been entered into the model. As well, the magnitude of particular relationships occasionally varied across gender lines, but by and large observed gender-related differences---including differences related to need gratification, importance, affective experience and satisfaction---were moderate. The family domain was the locus of most gender differences; females perceived this domain as more central and able to gratify "expressive needs" than men, and women deemed gratification of all types of needs within the family more important than men. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...