| dc.description.abstract | Happiness has proven to have a great number of positive effects, including social
bonding, better health and longer life. Within the well-being research, happiness is usually
treated as a hedonic dimension consisting of a positive evaluation towards life, presence of
pleasure and the absence of pain. A happy feeling however does not necessarily motivate
individuals to go the extra mile and persist in the face of challenge. Another set of positive
feelings and dispositions fills this role, for instance engagement, inspiration and personal
growth. The different classes of positive feelings and dispositions are usually defined as
hedonic well-being (HWB) (e.g. happiness and life satisfaction) and eudaimonic well-being
(EWB) (e.g. inspiration and personal growth). Within the framework of positive psychology,
the present thesis investigate how hedonic and eudaimonic dimensions of well-being relate to
behavior and experience at work. Following the Functional Well-Being Approach (Vittersø,
2013a), feeling happy (HWB) and functioning well (EWB) are thought to play different roles
in the good life and the regulation of behavior.
Data were collected among members of the Occupational Health Services in Norway
(N = 465), representing different occupations from the health services (e.g. doctors, nurses,
physiotherapists, and ergonomists). The sample had a mean age of 49.42 years, ranging from
27 to 69 years (SD = 9.70) with a total of 310 females (71.90%). The questionnaire consisted
of standardized measures in addition to the Day Reconstruction Method, which provides
subjective experiences from several episodes for each participant. Such data structures
comprise episode (within-person) data nested under data at the person level (the betweenperson
level) allowing for multilevel path analysis as well as traditional statistical analysis.
Paper I investigates the differences between HWB and EWB and their relation to
subjective health and sick-leave. HWB was conceptualized through life satisfaction and EWB was conceptualized through personal growth, both of which are considered relatively stable
dispositions. Results showed that life satisfaction and personal growth had distinct relations to
subjective health and sick-leave. While life satisfaction was negatively related to sick-leave,
personal growth was positively related to sick-leave. The relation was mediated by subjective
health for life satisfaction, but not for personal growth.
Paper II includes the dispositional perspective, but focuses more strongly on the
feelings associated with HWB and EWB. The primary aim was to investigate levels of
happiness (as an indicator of HWB) and inspiration (as an indicator of EWB) in easy versus
difficult work situations. Results showed that happiness and inspiration had distinct patterns
in how they related to work situations. When working with difficult task, happiness decreased
but inspiration increased. As indicated by the intra class correlation (ICC), almost 60% of the
variance in happiness was stable across episodes, whereas only 26% of the variance in
inspiration could be attributed to trait characteristics.
Paper III deals with how to best measure optimal experiences, and in particular the
state called flow. The psychometric quality of well-known measures of flow like the
Challenge-Skill Ratio (CSR), the Experience Fluctuation Model (EFM) and the Flow Simplex
(FS) are compared. Due to discrepancies in how flow is described and defined in the
literature, the aim was also to explore whether flow belongs to the hedonic or the eudaimonic
dimension. A new way of treating the data in terms of flow-distance (continuous variable)
instead of predefined categories is explored. Results showed that the Flow Simplex was a
more sensitive tool to capture the variations of experience, and that analyzing experience in
terms of flow-distance removed the limitations associated with using the predefined
categories of the EFM. All measures of flow explained substantially more variance in
eudaimonic variables than hedonic variables, challenging the widespread idea that flow is
about enjoying the activity. Taken together, analyses of the different elements in hedonia and eudaimonia
indicated that HWB was associated with the evaluation of goals that have been achieved and
needs that have been fulfilled, whereas EWB reflected the processes leading towards goal
achievement and need fulfillment. Consequently, the hedonic dimension cannot adequately
explain the bandwidth of human flourishing; a eudaimonic dimension must be added to fully
account for the good life. To reveal such differences, the methods we use in analyzing data
must be sensitive enough to capture the variations in experience. | nb_NO |
