Wellbeing Matters in Kuwait: The Alnowair’s Bareec Education Initiative

Abstract

Wellbeing is predictive of improved learning outcomes, better mental health, prosocial and civic behavior, higher work productivity, and enhanced life satisfaction. Given that literature in support of wellbeing is robust, it is incumbent on local communities to put this research into practice and develop culturally-competent programs that promote the skills to increase it. In collaboration with Alnowair, a non-profit organization committed to increasing wellbeing in Kuwait, a semester-long positive psychology program, called Bareec, was designed to generate positive emotions and increase levels of flourishing in university and secondary school students. The Bareec program consisted of 15-min weekly instructions in positive psychology and positive psychology interventions. To test the program's efficacy, Bareec was implemented in the national public university and in 10 secondary schools (total N = 977). Relative to control groups, Bareec university participants showed greater levels of flourishing (eudaimonic wellbeing; d = .32), while secondary school participants showed enhanced positive affect (hedonic wellbeing; d = .27) in addition to a small improvement in flourishing (d = .15).

Positive psychology interventions in the United Arab Emirates: boosting wellbeing – and changing culture?

“…Another study in neighboring Kuwait (i.e. Lambert, Passmore, Scull et al, 2019 ) also showed changes to life satisfaction, but only in university students, and not secondary school students. It should be noted that in these two studies, facilitators had a pre-existing relationship with participants, which was not the case here, and which may have impacted findings (i.e.…”

“…A UAE study (Lambert, Passmore, & Joshanloo, 2019) confirmed that participants indeed held these beliefs, which were minimized through PPI use. This latter study, as well as another conducted in Kuwait (Lambert, Passmore, Scull et al, 2019) nonetheless tested the effects of eight and 14 week long PPI programs, both of which were successful in increasing the balance of positive affect and reports of life satisfaction.…”

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“…Accordingly, programming and policy developments are growing globally (Hendriks et al, 2019;Kim et al, 2018). Still, while such growth is happening across the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) (i.e., Lambert & Pasha-Zaidi, 2019;Lambert, Passmore, & Joshanloo, 2019;Lambert, Passmore, Scull et al, 2019;Rao et al, 2015), as a whole, the region lags in terms of knowledge development (Biglu et al, 2014;El Borai et al, 2018;Ryan & Daly, 2019). Beyond the need to produce localized data, assessing the efficacy of such programs can be useful in developing policies towards greater student wellbeing (Clair, 2014;Högberg, 2019;Marquez & Main, 2020;Powell & Graham, 2017;Thorburn, 2018), critical in times of stability and in a COVID-19 context, where early reports show that youth wellbeing remains a concern in many nations (Hawke et al, 2020;Huang & Zhao, 2020;Marques de Miranda et al, 2020).…”

“…Relative to controls, treatment groups showed greater prosocial behavior, subjective wellbeing, and empathy, but no change to mental health. Finally, a study in Kuwait (Lambert, Passmore, Scull et al, 2019) delivering weekly PPIs to almost 1000 university and secondary students, showed that relative to controls three months later, university students reported greater eudaimonic wellbeing, while secondary students increased their hedonic wellbeing. The latter was only one of three published studies examining the use of PPIs in the region (i.e., Barrington et al, 2019;Lambert, Passmore, & Joshanloo, 2019; see Rao et al's (2015) review for more).…”

Revisión sistemática sobre modelos multidimensionales del bienestar y su medición en estudiantes universitarios

“…Con respecto a los trabajos con diseño experimental, los autores reportan que los programas de intervención en educación al aire libre tienen impacto a largo plazo en el florecimiento de los estudiantes (Shellman y Hill, 2017). Así mismo los programas de bienestar para estudiantes universitarios tienen un efecto positivo en su florecimiento (Lambert et al, 2019a;Lambert et al, 2019b), resultado distinto en programas online sobre atención plena donde no se encontraron efectos significativos (Flett et al, 2019).…”