Browsing by Author "Bäckström, Eeva"

The purpose of the study was to find out, if the character strength intervention that is based on the See the Good! -character strength pedagogy by Lotta Uusitalo and Kaisa Vuorinen influences children’s well-being. Many previous research show that character strength education advances children’s well-being. The intention of this study was to examine more closely what kind of effect the character strength intervention has on chil- dren’s subjective well-being, school related happiness and self-esteem. These influ- ences were observed between boys and girls and between boys and girls of different age. The aim of this study was to offer relevant research data for care and education sector for them to understand what kind of significance the character strength education has for children’s well-being. This study was carried out as a quantitative intervention study and the intervention was a part of a larger #uuttakoulua initiative. The data was collected in the beginning of the intervention in September 2019 and then again when four months of the intervention had passed in December 2019. The final measurement in 2020 wasn’t used because of the coronavirus pandemic. 240 comprehensive school students took part in the study. There were twelve municipalities and nineteen comprehensive schools involved in the #uut- takoulua initiative and those who wanted participated in this character strength interven- tion. This study consisted of a sample group with 184 students and a control group with 56 students. An electronic questionnaire was used to collect the data and the data was analyzed by SPSS-program with Wilcoxon signed rank test. Generally, there were no statistically significant differences in different well-being sectors in the sample group during the character strength intervention. However, there was a statistically significant rise in subjective well-being in the 10-year-olds from the sample group during the intervention. In the same way there was a statistically significant rise in school related happiness in the 12-year-olds from the sample group. Whereas the 11- year-olds’, from the sample group, the subjective well-being lowered statistically signifi- cantly. Little differences from different genders emerged when boys and girls of different age were compared. The results of this study indicate that character strength intervention has moderate effects on children’s well-being. Further research is needed to get confir- mation for the results of this study.