engleski

How to find happiness : Adolescents’ life goals and free time activities

This research had two aims. The first one was to examine the relationship between orientations to happiness and subjective well-being, life goals, free time activities, self-control and delay of satisfaction. The second aim is to compare global and momentary judgments of cognitive (life satisfaction) and affective (positive and negative affect) components of subjective well-being, in general, and related to engagement in different free time activities. Several specific goals have been researched in this study. The participants were 769 students aged from 18 to 28 years, with mean age of 20.57. 155 of those subjects participated also in the second part of the study, where the experience sampling method was employed. The results showed that based on the K-mean cluster analysis, participants could be grouped into four groups: participants who highly endorse hedonic and eudaimonic orientation (the High group), participants who do not endorse either of them (the Low group), participants who live a eudaimonic and those who live a hedonic life. The High group exceeded the Low group on life satisfaction, positive affect, intrinsic and extrinsic life goals. The High group exceeded the Hedonic group on life satisfaction, positive affect, intrinsic goals, self-control and delay of satisfaction. The High group exceeded Eudaimonic group on life satisfaction, positive affect and extrinsic goals. The Eudaimonic group exceeded the Low group on life satisfaction, positive affect, intrinsic goals, self-control and delay of satisfaction. The Eudaimonic group exceeded the Hedonic group on positive affect, intrinsic goals, self-control and delay of satisfaction. The Hedonic group exceeded the Low group on life satisfaction, positive affect, intrinsic and extrinsic goals. The Hedonic group exceeded the Eudaimonic group on extrinsic goals. Hedonic motives for free time activities are more pronounced than eudaimonic motives for reading, electronic media / music listening, socializing, outdoor activities and dancing which are more hedonically than eudaimonically motivated. Furthermore, there are no differences between activities in hedonic motives. On the contrary, activities differ in eudaimonic motives: reading, artistic activities, sports and dancing are more eudaimonically motivated activities than electronic media / music listening, socializing and outdoor activities excluding sports). Global and momentary judgements of (life) satisfaction are only weakly correlated, while the correlations of global and momentary judgements of positive and negative affects are higher. Global judgements of positive and negative affect are statistically higher than momentary judgements. Activities with hedonic and eudaimonic characteristics contribute to subjective well-being differently. At the between-person level of analysis, hedonic characteristics of activities are relevant for all three components of subjective well-being, with this relationship being negative for negative affect. Eudaimonic characteristics are relevant only for positive and negative affect, but to a smaller extent than the hedonic ones. At this level of analysis, the relationship between eudaimonic characteristics and negative affect is positive. At within-person level of analysis, hedonic characteristics are more important for satisfaction and negative affect (relationship with negative affect is negative), while eudaimonic characteristics are more important for positive affect.

well-being; life goals; orientations to happiness; leisure; experience sampling

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