Effects Of Personality, Self-esteem And Social Support On Subjective Well-being Of Retired Military Officers

Aging of population structure has been an inevitable global trend in the 21st century. Both the psychological health and physical health are issues of great importance to the elders. Subjective well-being, one of the most important psychological parameters reflecting the elders' quality of life, is a hot spot in the positive psychology fields. As an unusual group, retired military officers attract many researchers' eyes. However, there are few reports about the relationships between the subjective well-being of retired military-officers and its influencing factors such as personality, self-esteem, and social support.The purpose of this research is to investigate the relationship between personality, self-esteem, social support and subjective well-being of retired military officers and to identify the effects of these three factors on the retired military officers.Two hundred and twenty retired military officers in Shenyang Military Area Command were assessed with Memorial University of Newfoundland Scale of Happiness, Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, Self-Esteem Scale, and Perceived Social Support Scale. Statistical analysis was performed with SPSS14.0 professional statistical software, including descriptive statistics, independent samples t-test, one-way ANOVA, correlation analysis, multiple linear regressions analysis, multivarinte regression analysis and path analysis. The results were listed as follows:1. The subjective well-being of retired military officers was in a high level, and the subjective well-being status showed significant difference in aspects of age, educational scale, and self-estimated health.2. Concerned with the personality traits, the retired military officers in this study showed a higher mean score of extro-introversion and a lower mean score of psychoticism than the Chinese norm; retired female military officers showed a lower mean score of neuroticism than the Chinese norm. Extro-introversion was found to be positively related to subjective well-being while neuroticism and psychoticism showed negative correlation with subjective well-being. Subjective well-being of extroversion and intermedius type was higher than that of introversions, with a significant difference. The subjective well-being of the stable form was higher than that of the intermedius type. And the subjective well-being of the unstable type was the lowest.3. The self-esteem of retired military officers was in a high level, and was positvely related to subjective well-being. In other words, those retired military officers who had a higher self-esteem also had a higher subjective well-being.4. Related analysis revealed that social support had a significant positive correlation with subjective well-being. There was no significant difference between the subjective well-being of officers with high and middle social supports. Retired military officers with lowest social support also had the lowest subjective well-being. Among the three dimensions of social supports, support from friends influenced subjective well-being indirectly.5. Path analysis showed that personality, self-esteem and social support were important influencers of the subjective well-being of retired military officers. Their effects were performed through seven pathways. Neuroticism and self-esteem had both direct and indirect effects on the subjective well-being of retired military officers. Other factors, such as extro-introversion, social support, and psychoticism, influenced subjective well-being indirectly.