Expressions of Life Meaning among College Students

Abstract

This study examined the views of 132 undergraduate students (35 men, 97 women) regarding what they considered to be contributing factors to a worthwhile or meaningful life. They rated, on a 5-point Likert scale, their agreement with each of 40 statements. Cluster analysis yielded three clusters which best described the data. One cluster comprised a religious group, and the other two clusters were nonreligious, with one having characteristics of both the religious and nonreligious cluster.

Systematic review of meaning in life assessment instruments

“…For an overview of the distribution of final quality scores, instruments in each table were divided into three categories (low score: <0.50, medium score: 0.50–0.70 and high score: >0.70). In the group of unidimensional nomothetic instruments, 7/25 have low scores , 8/25 medium scores and 10/25 high scores . In the group of multidimensional nomothetic instruments, 3/23 have low scores , 12/23 medium scores and 8/23 high scores .…”

“…Of the 59 MiL instruments, 48 apply nomothetic measurement. Twenty‐five of these are unidimensional (Table ), whereas 23 instruments are multidimensional (Table ). Eleven instruments use an idiographic approach (Table ).…”

“…Criterion F does not apply to three unidimensional nomothetic instruments because calculation of scale scores is not intended [42,43,52]. From the remaining instruments, 19/22 report satisfactory values for Cronbach's alpha, whereas retest reliabilities were reported for only 7/25 instruments, with 2/25 fulfilling criterion F. The median elapsed time interval was 4 weeks (range 1 week-1 year).…”

“…The total score assigned to each instrument in the final columns of Tables 1-3 For an overview of the distribution of final quality scores, instruments in each table were divided into three categories (low score: <0.50, medium score: 0.50-0.70 and high score: >0.70). In the group of unidimensional nomothetic instruments, 7/25 have low scores [10,34,40,42,43,47,52], 8/25 medium scores [35,36,39,41,48,50,56,57] and 10/25 high scores [37,38,[44][45][46]49,51,[53][54][55]. In the group of multidimensional nomothetic instruments, 3/23 have low scores [66,76,79], 12/23 medium scores [58,60,[62][63][64]67,69,70,74,75,78,80] and 8/23 high scores [59,61,65,68,[71]…”