Poster Presentation 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

How Do We Best Reach And Enhance The Well-Being Of Children: Through Parents, (Other) Children Or Teachers? Results From The Strength, Joy And Compassion Project. (#573)

Ase Fagerlund 1 , Mari Laakso 1 2 , Anu-Katriina Pesonen 2 , Johan Eriksson 3
  1. Public Health Research Program, Folkhalsan Research Center, HELSINKI, Finland
  2. Department of Psychology and Logopedics, Helsinki University, Helsinki
  3. Department of General Practice and Primary Health Care, Helsinki University, Helsinki, Finland

Aim: To enhance child well-being through research-based methods in positive psychology. We aim to explore whether the best routes to achieve this aim goes through parents, other important adults in the lives of children (school-staff) or through directly training the children themselves and their peers in methods of well-being.

 

Method: Three separate studies are carried out:

Study 1) Flourishing families (N=72). Eight-week parental groups to enhance parental well-being and, subsequently, the well-being of their children. Wait-list RCT.

Study 2) Positive education (N=141). A whole school year project to enhance the well-being of students in middle school (10-11 year olds). Clustered RCT.

Study 3) Positive school (N= 254). A whole year school project to enhance the well-being of school-staff and, subsequently, the well-being of their students. Clustered RCT.

All studies are evaluated before and after the interventions with an extensive set of measures: Questionnaires, experience sampling of daily life (mood, flow, coping etc.), physiological measures (HRV, salivary cortisol).

 

Results: Content, outline and implementation will be presented along with main results.

 

Conclusions: Results will be discussed in the light of the overall question of how to best reach and enhance the well-being of children.