The Art-of-Living in Children and Adolescents. Development and Evaluation of Interventions to Improve Well-Being.

The pursuit of a happy and good life is gaining importance increasingly. In today’s world the orientation towards traditional values, such as religion or politics, has taken a back seat. In this context, art-of-living can provide assistance. It aims to instill a conscious way of living which leads to a fullfiling and happy life. In philosophy, the construct is defined as a mindful and self-determined way of dealing with one’s self and way of life and it suggests a continuous critical reflection on one’s own life. Consequently, it is important to recognize one’s own abilities, strengths, and weaknesses and to be aware of the opportunities in life to obtain subjective well-being through mindful effort. Art-of-living can be assigned to positive psychology, which applies in this context, because it deals with the conditions and processes that enable self-development of the individual. The focus is on the systematic development of what is beneficial for well-being, such as human strengths, savoring, or optimism. It has been pointed out that this bundle acts to buffer stressful situations and can lead to a fulfilled life, which is also the aim of art-of-living. Research has shown that positive psychology does not only deal with adults. It has pointed out that positive psychology is also important for children and adolescents and so the study of positive psychology is alive and well in children and youth. Already young children have to deal with numerous life stressors. For this reason, the preventive use of positive action like dealing with one’s self and dealing with life stressors is advocated by proponents of positive education. Hence, interventions of positive psychology have shown their effectiveness in numerous studies. Especially those who are developed for young children are promising. One context in which a lot of research on children and adolescents takes place is the scholastic context. There are numerous of intervention studies in the field of positive psychology dealing with different aspects, like well-being, resilience or mental health. In summary, to deal with children’s positive psychology is of great interest for today’s society. Nevertheless, there is no research that deals with the art-of-living of children and adolescents as of yet. Neither are there many instruments to measure art-of-living of children and adolescents as well as constructs of positive psychology. A huge number of instruments already exists but mainly developed for adults. It is common that researchers in the field of psychology for children and adolescents use instruments for adults and modify them. A lot of adult instruments consist of a huge number of items and so they cannot easily be used for studies with young children. Therefore, for some studies only a selection of items is made. It is uncertain whether complex constructs can be described with only a selection of items. Furthermore, there is an even smaller number of measurements in German. This is a limitation for cross-cultural studies and for research in Germany where young students are not familiar with the English language. In light of the described research gaps, the present doctoral thesis addresses the (1) development of interventions to improve art-of-living of children and adolescents, (2) training children and adolescents from different contexts, (3) the validation of child-adapted questionnaires, and (4) the translation of a common instrument in the field of positive psychology into German. The purpose of Study 1 was to develop an intervention to improve art-of-living of children and adolescents in the scholastic context for students of different age groups - primary school students and students from higher grades. Study 1.1 dealt with the initial examination of whether it is possible to enhance the art-of-living by training selected art-of-living strategies. Therefore, training with three conditions was developed and conducted with secondary school students (ages 16–19). For Study 1.2, a second art-of-living training was developed and conducted with children from primary school (ages 8–11). In summary, the training successfully enhanced art-of-living. In Study 1.1, the art-of-living measures increased significantly for the training conditions compared to a control group. In addition, Study 1.2 showed that higher levels of the art-of-living lead to a better quality of life. The aim of Study 2 was to transfer the art-of-living into the clinical-therapeutic context. Again, two studies were conducted. Study 2.1 aimed at identifying those art-of-living components that show differences for adolescents who are suffering from anxiety or depression by using a pre-experimental comparative design. The results could show significant differences of the art-of-living subscales in the comparison to a clinical and a nonclinical sample. A specific pattern was identified for the clinical sample. In Study 2.2, need-oriented and predefined art-of-living interventions were developed, implemented and evaluated based on a randomized two factors multivariate 3x3 design with repeated measures. The main outcome measures are art-of-living, life satisfaction, depression and anxiety. The results show that the developed training improved the art-of-living as well as the satisfaction with life, and reduced depression. Study 3 aimed at translating instruments for children and adolescents measuring constructs of positive psychology into German. Therefore, the Satisfaction with Life Scale - child version (SWLS-C), which is one of the most commonly used questionnaires in the field of positive psychology, was translated with the use of a backtranslation-proceeding (Study 3.1) and validated by a sample of 1099 students aged 8 to 17 (Study 3.2). The analyses included retesting of reliability, concurrent and discriminant validity by additionally measuring several established constructs of positive psychology. Model fit indices, internal consistencies, retest-reliability as well as concurrent and discriminant validity evidence were satisfying. In conclusion, this doctoral thesis makes an important contribution to research on the topic of the art-of-living of children and adolescents, particularly in the improvement by training art-of-living strategies. Moreover, the results allow implications for intervention programs for different contexts, i.e. school and clinical-therapeutic context, as well as different age groups. Furthermore, instruments to measure the effects on life satisfaction for children and adolescents were developed and can be used for the systematic evaluation of interventions in future studies for German speaking countries. As a consequence, SWLS-C data of children and adolescents of different nationalities can be compared and in addition as cross-cultural measurement invariance studies can be conducted