Attribution Style, Self-Esteem and Marital Status as Predictors of Life Satisfaction.
ABSTRACT
This study investigated attribution style, self-esteem and marital status as predictors of life satisfaction. Participants were three hundred and fifty (350) junior and senior staff of Enugu State University Teaching Hospital (Park Lane Hospital) and the University of Nigerian Teaching Hospital, Enugu (UNTH).
Their ages ranged between 24 to 53 years, with a mean age of 35.85. Cross sectional design was adopted. Three instruments were used for data collection. Satisfaction with life Scale, attribution style scale, and self-esteem scale.
Three hypotheses were tested. Result of the regression analysis showed that the four dimensions of attribution style were significant predictors of life satisfaction (p < .001). Self-esteem significantly predicted life satisfaction (p < .001).
Similarly, marital status is also a significant predictor of life satisfaction (p < .001). The implications of the finding were highlighted, limitations were stated and suggestions were made for further studies.
Introduction
Enduring satisfaction with one’s life-as-a-whole is called ‘life-satisfaction’. It is also commonly referred to as happiness and subjective wellbeing (Veenhoven, 2006).
Life satisfaction is the way a person perceives how his or her life has been and how he/she feels about where he/she is going in the future.
It is a measure of well-being as well as a cognitive, global judgment. It is also a sense of having a favorable attitude of one’s life as a whole (Bailey, Eng, Frisch, & Snyder, 2007).
Life satisfaction has been described as an overall cognitive assessment of one’s quality of life. This assessment is based on how people believe their life should be in relation to how it is (Paschali & Tsitsas, 2009).
Since life satisfaction involves an affective state of happiness, several definitions depict happiness as an affective phenomenon.
For instance, Wessman and Ricks (1966) posit that happiness appears as an overall evaluation of the quality of the individual’s own experience in the conduct of his or her vital affairs. In a similar vein, Fordyce (1972) stated that happiness is a particular emotion.
It is an overall evaluation made by the individual in counting all his pleasant and unpleasant experiences in the recent past. These definitions are close to Bentham’s (1789) famous definition of happiness as the sum of pleasures and pains’, which also involves the notion of an ‘affect balance.
A contemporary variation on this theme is proposed by Kahneman’s (2000) in the notion of ‘objective happiness’, which is the ‘raw’ affective experience that underlies the overall evaluation of life.
From the cognitive perspective, life satisfaction is also defined as a cognitive phenomenon, that is, as the result of a deliberate evaluation process. Life satisfaction has also been depicted as a happy disposition and as a positive attitude towards life.
REFERENCES
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