engleski

Do lessons in happiness work? Happiness among the Dutch secondary school students: Using the Yesterday's Diary

The purpose of this study is to assess the effects of lessons in happiness in a secondary school setting, and argue that measures of happiness obtained through diary methods are appropriate in that context. Traditional measures of happiness mostly rely on global evaluations of life. However, research shows that is a complex cognitive task, often accomplished by consulting heuristics and susceptible to various biases. In contrast, assessments collected in real time or linked to diaries have the advantage of connecting happiness and time-use, as well as decreasing memory bias, achieved by minimizing the amount of time between an experience and the report of that experience. In the context of adolescence, another limitation of the measures that reflect cognitive appraisal of life is that many youngsters have not yet developed a clear view on the quality of their life. Further on, in the framework of intervention evaluation, another potential drawback of focusing on cognition is a positive bias, resulting from the course teaching people to think in a more positive way, while they may still feel unhappy. In that context, measurement of the intervention effect in this study was focused more on the affective component of happiness, namely, the hedonic level of affect. The data was collected in 2009, among secondary school pupils in the Netherlands (average age M=13.48, SD=1.16). The pupils used an internet application diary based on the Day Reconstruction Method (Kahneman et al., 2004), before, during and 6 months after the lessons in happiness, in which they systematically reconstructed the previous day, dividing the day into activities in chronological order and rating the mood for each of the listed activities on a one-item graphical scale. This specific application used (Veenhoven, Vermeulen & Hermus 2005) can be obtained at RISBO, a research institute at the Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Happiness; The day reconstrtuction method; Adolescents; Happiness interventions

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