Well-being at School and Work: Overcoming Inequalities

As the level of reported well-being declines worldwide, scholars have started highlighting patterns of well-being at different stages of life and the socio-ecological factors that contribute to producing inequalities to design appropriate prevention and intervention programs, and inform social policies.

At the beginning of the 2008 recession, the level of well-being declined around the world and across all age groups. This decline was most abrupt in Europe, including Switzerland. However, even before the onset of the economic crisis, scholars had started focusing on subjective and psychological approaches, particularly on the role of schools in students’ well-being or well-being at work.

As no common definition exists, we consider well-being a multidimensional and latent construct that includes aspects of feeling good (hedonic concept), the presence of positive and the absence of negative affect, and doing well (eudemonic concept) at school or work. We should therefore conceptualize well-being at school and at work from the perspective of the person feeling good (hedonic concept), but also from the perspective of good performance and ability to function positively in these specific contexts (eudemonic concept).

Well-being Over Time

According to previous research, the accumulating data show that the levels of subjective well-being are not stable and thus, there is significant change across childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. More specifically, the literature indicates there is a tendency for well-being to decrease with age from adolescence to adulthood.

Recently published studies corroborated this decreasing trend, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although identifying school well-being patterns at a given time is an important first step, knowing whether, why, and how these patterns change longitudinally over time during school and later when working is essential to design specific prevention and intervention programs and to inform social policies.

Researchers assessing survey data from the earlier stages of the first COVID-19 wave have pointed to an apparent increase in the frequency and severity of mental illness symptoms and a decline in psychological well-being for adolescents and adults.

Recent research on schools clearly indicates that we should use a heterogeneous approach in the design of school-specific prevention and intervention programs. Therefore, adolescents particularly with low socio-ecological resources and at lower well-being levels need specific attention to support upward transitions to higher well-being level patterns and to mitigate downward transitions. As the old saying goes, “For to the one who has, more will be given” holds for the high well-being level students’ group, the proverbial continuation of that old saying, stating “…but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away” applies distinctly for lower well-being levels in adolescence.

Well-being Among Immigrants

When considering the eudemonic perspective of well-being, i.e., “doing well,” research shows consistent gaps between (children of) immigrants and natives. Moreover, when looking at school outcomes, the PISA test scores show consistently lower scores for math and language skills for both first- and second-generation migrants in almost all OECD countries, even when the socio-economic status is controlled for. These gaps carry over to the labor market, where the children of immigrants are more likely to be unemployed, and when they are employed, are more likely to be over-skilled and underpaid.

We will go into more detail on the wage gaps between immigrants and natives, and whether this is considered “fair” in the fourth blog post in this series and look at one possible way in which immigrants can reclaim agency in the labor market in the fifth blog post.

This leaves the question of how the two concepts of well-being are related. Little is known about whether higher levels of resilience result in better school or labor market outcomes or whether it can attenuate the negative effects of discrimination observed when we focus on the eudemonic concept. In the final blog post of this series, we will explore the relationship between students’ immigration background, their resilience, and their career plans.

Wassilis Kassis is a Professor of Educational Psychology at the FHNW School of Education as well as a Project Co-Leader of the nccr  – on the move project Overcoming Inequalities with Education. His research focus in the field of educational sciences is on ‘Socialization’ and ‘Resilience.’

Reference:

–Kassis, W., Janousch, C., Sidler, P., Aksoy, D., Favre, C., Ertanir, B (2022, under review at PlosOne): Longitudinal Patterns of Students’ Well-Being in Early Adolescence: A Latent Class and Latent Transition Analysis.