Boosting Well-being:an Longitudinal Intervention Experiment Based On Character Strengths

For thousands of years well-being is the power source for people’s struggling, which is also the ultimate goal our human society are pursuit of for generations. With the deepening knowledglization, globalization, urbanization and informatization in today’s world, people’s material life has been greatly enriched, but the degree of people’s well-being did not get the same level of improvement. On the contrary, more and more people are suffering from anxiety, depression and other modern problems. For college students, as the pressures from getting a higher degree, interpersonal relationship, and looking for a decent job have increased, there are growing population with psychological problems, and the rising serious incidents continue to occur, which have rang the alarm to call for the Mental Health Education in universities. Traditional pathological and problem-oriented mental health education failed to prevent these psychological problems of college students fundamentally, while fortunately, the emergence of Positive Psychology provides a new perspective to solve them well-being perspective, by enhancing the sense of well-being as the main purpose, introducing the related theories of positive psychology into the mental health education system in universities, designing a scientific, reasonable, effective strategies for college students, the sense of well-being can be effectively boosted, interpersonal harmonies can be promoted, social attitude can be altered, anxiety and depression can be reduced.So far, however, intervention study on boosting well-being is rare, compared to domestic researchers, foreign researchers have carried out such kind of studies and achieved certain results, and explored a variety of effective strategies to enhance well-being. However, whether these strategies are fit in Chinese traditional culture, and whether they can be equally effective in using to enhance the Chinese people’s well-being sense need to do more empirical tests. Therefore, both in terms of a realistic level or theoretical level, intervention experiments on boosting college students’ well-being are bearing important meanings and values.The basic idea of this study followed the general course of psychological study, namely the theoretical analysisâ†'tool examinationâ†'empirical studyâ†'countermeasures discussion. The latest intervention strategy-recognizing and utilizing Character Strengths was selected, based on literature review on the basic concepts character strengths, theoretical origin, basic characteristics, measurement tools, influencing factors and the relevant researches on well-being and character strength, and got the conclusion that well-being of Chinese college students level has links with their own character strengths. Meanwhile, the assumption of using their of their character strengths to enhance Chinese students’ level of well-being and reduce negative emotions such as anxiety and depression; then study 1 was conducted to pave the way for the following experiments. Because the measurement tool of character strengths (Values in Action Inventory of Strengths) was developed by Park et al. in Western culture context, its cross-cultural reliability and validity have not gone through rigorous statistical testing. Despite with high face validity for the questionnaires and more than 100 million people have been tested, but the questionnaire is rather too long and ineffective statistical techniques exist, its construct validity has not been effectively verified, so the first step was to examine its applicability among Chinese college students; and after getting the data support of the measurement tool’s validation, combing with frequent psychological problems, low level of well-being, general depression and anxiety happened on college students, extensively excavating, scientifically absorbing and employing present theoretical resources, and fully understanding the intervention strategy for enhancing college students’well-being, combining the reality on campus, experiment framework of this study was constructed, methodologies such as questionnaire, statistical analysis, feedback tracking, and measurements on multi-times were used during a six-week long intervention experiment in class, and requiring students of the experimental group to utilize their character strengths creatively, in which there are tutors controlling and giving feedback to guarantee the rationality and effectiveness, and these data of well-being index collecting in three times, would be used to reveal overall well-being(life satisfactory, anxiety, depression, etc.) change in the process that college students define, employ and habitlize character strengths, analyze the causes and influences; finally, discuss the external eco-efficiency of this study, analyze its insufficiency and the future perspective, propose measurements to enhance college students’ individual well-being.The main conclusions of this study are as follows:(1) The analysis result about of the reliability and validity of the questionnaire of Values in Action Inventory of Strengths with the samples of Chinese college students in this study provides certain support for the character strength theory;(2)The internal consistencyαcoefficient and retest reliability among Chinese college students samples have been over 0.70, wich can explain this questionnaire possess good reliability;(3) The mixed results in the convergent validity and discriminant validity Values in Action Inventory of Strengths indicate that the division of the six virtues in the original theory is not appropriate for Chinese college students;(4) After packaged strategy of items, each indicator in the related models of 24 character strengths in VIA-IS can be accepted, combined with conclusion 2, indicating that the questionnaire can be used to measure Chinese college students’ character strengths;(5) Chinese college students can utilize character strengths to boost their overall level of well-being both in the short and long term;(6) By using the intervention experiment strategy "recognizing and utilizing Character Strengths ", Chinese college students’ well-being level will be enhanced;(7) The intervention experiment strategy "recognizing and utilizing Character Strengths " exerts effects both during the intervention and 10 weeks after it finished;(8) "Placebo effect" exists in the intervention experiment,while compared with the real experiment, this effect is effective in a short time, and it will gradually decline and even disappear as the time passed;(9) Persistent effort has a significant positive prediction on enhancing the overall well-being, that is, the higher the participants’ persistent effort, the higher the level will enhance, and vice versa.In summary, this study has both theoretical significance and practical values in proving that Chinese college students can use their own character strengths to improve the overall level of well-being. However, some limitations also exist, two main aspects of which are as follows:First one is item packing strategy was applied when testing the structure validity, which will possibly the culture difference existing in these items; Second one is when examining the level of individual well-being, for a simple analysis about the major results, these variables such as life satisfaction, anxiety, self-state were taken place by overall well-being, which caused insufficient analysis about the results.Therefore, future researches should devote to compensate for the above shortcomings, try to enlarge more sample types of participants, make comparison on different intervention strategies, and separate the placebo effect, etc.