Podium Presentation 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

This presentation will share the results of a national youth survey of 25,000 young Australian’s between 15-25 who completed a shortened version of the latest Well-being-Profile (Huppert & Marsh, 2018) exploring which individual and contextual factors were correlated with higher and lower levels of well-being.

 Australian has seen many cultural trends emerge in recent years implicating how youth experience life; an education system with a bias towards university, the trend of taking a gap year after school to “de-stress” and young people now living at home for longer. Despite anecdotal and parental views about what is best for youth, little has been know about how various contextual choices and environments affect well-being in a large population.

 In this presentation, conclusions and results will be shared detailing:

• Which post-school pathways had higher levels of well-being
• The role of employment both at school and post school and its relationship to well-being
• The concerning differences between males and females in their well-being and daily functioning
• The alarming differences in well-being between populations such as those with a disability compared to those without.

 This level of insight provides an important context for social policy, health promotion and employment programs and school education initiatives.