Walls of Well-Being (WOWs): a Pilot Study of a New Methodology to Explore Children’s and Adolescents’ Perceived Sources of Happiness

Abstract

Lay theories are everyday explanations and attributions given for psychological phenomena. They are important because they affect people's behaviours and cognitions. Lay theories have typically been studied using interviews and surveys of individuals. We describe a pilot study that employed a new, community-based, methodology that we used to explore children's and adolescents' lay theories of happiness. We collected 802 responses to the phrase BI feel happy when ______^which was stencilled repeatedly on large walls we called Walls of Well-Being (WOWs) installed in a kindergarten-elementary school and a junior-high school. An interpretive, grounded theory approach for coding these qualitative data was used. Five main themes emerged in the children/adolescents' responses: Activities, Relationships, Other Oriented, Personal Feelings, and Receiving. Chi-square analyses revealed significant differences in the prevalence of response themes between the two schools demonstrating that the WOWs are sensitive to community differences. Advantages and disadvantages of the WOWs methodology are discussed as well as suggestions for mitigating disadvantages in future studies utilizing WOWs. This new method holds promise as an assessment tool that could be applied across a wide range of psychological phenomena (e.g., gratitude and hope) and environments (e.g., hospitals and businesses).

How Do Young Children Understand and Action their Own Well-Being? Positive Psychology, Student Voice, and Well-Being Literacy in Early Childhood

“…Interestingly, school did not feature as a prominent context in the drawings in the current sample. This result aligns with Holder et al's (2016) study in kindergartenelementary and junior high students, who, when asked to record what makes them happy, did not place school within their top ten answers. Our finding is also similar to Sixsmith et al (2007), where elementary children did not nominate school as a prominent theme in their wellbeing (in contrast, their parents and their teachers perceived school to have a strong influence on wellbeing).…”

“…According to Holder et al, (2016) when it comes to positive education "Often interventions are developed using a top-down approach whereby the interventions are developed by researchers who then apply them to a selected group" (p. 103). The current study, by examining how five and six year old children understand wellbeing (as compared to researcher and adult ideas) provide a child-centred view of wellbeing and suggest that children have a robust enough understanding of the topic to be valid participants in the design of interventions.…”

“…This study is one of only a handful of papers to tie together positive psychology and early childhood studies. Although the topic of wellbeing literacy has been explored with older children in the elementary years (Fattore et al, 2007(Fattore et al, , 2009Sixsmith et al, 2007;Waters et al, in press) and teens (Holder et al, 2016;Woodman, 2003) 'voice research' with children aged six and under is rare when it comes to wellbeing. The constructivist approach is a strength of the current study, given that there is no prior theory that could be applied and when considering that the topic of wellbeing literacy is very recent and taking into account the philosophy of 'child agency' that underpins this paper.…”

“…Students at the older end of the middle childhood stage (ages 9-10) expressed a more multidimensional and interconnected understanding of wellbeing than students at the younger end off middle childhood (ages 6-7) who tended to focus on simple emotions and activities, located in external activities. Holder et al's. (2016) studied children and teen's descriptions of happiness (kindergarten through to junior high) by asking students to write single-sentence responses to describe what made them happy on "Walls of Wellbeing" (WOWs).…”

“…Unfortunately, Holder et al (2016) did not separately analyze answers of kindergarten children from elementary students, meaning that no conclusions could be drawn specifically about how children in the early childhood phase (i.e., kindergarten and first year of school) conceptualize wellbeing compared to those in the older year groups of elementary school. While Waters et al (in press) found age differences in understanding and complexity of wellbeing between eight to nine years olds compared six and seven years, there has been no research that explores the potentially unique wellbeing literacy of five and six year olds.…”