THE INVESTIGATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE MEANING ATTRIBUTED TO LIFE AND WORK, DEPRESSION, AND SUBJECTIVE AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING

ABSTRACT

The last four-five decades have witnessed an unprecedented rate of changes in the demographic, social, technological, political, economic life, family structures, which force individuals to face an increasing number of challenges. The negative impact of these fast changes are best reflected in the constant increase of the number of persons suffering of different forms of mental and emotional malfunctioning and reporting low levels of satisfaction with life and subjective well-being. Investigating protective factors and their buffering effect in face of adversity, literature has indicated that there is a strong positive relationship between attributing meaning to one’s life and work, and different forms of well-being and mental-emotional health. The present research has two major objectives: (i) the investigation of the possible differences in the meaning attributed to life and work between different demographic groups (gender, level of education); and (ii) the investigation of the relationship between meaning in life, meaningful work and subjective and psychological well-being, and mental health (depression) within a young Transylvanian Hungarian population. Our study included 363 participants, residents in the central and eastern parts of Transylvania (Cluj, Mures, Harghita, and Covasna counties), assessed on the following dimensions: meaning attributed to life, meaningfulness of work, subjective and psychological well-being, and depression. Our results indicate gender and education dependent differences in meaning attributed to work and components of psychological well-being. Furthermore, regression analyses indicate that meaningfulness of work has no significant predictive power on either satisfaction with life and subjective well-being, or depression, while the presence of meaning in life and psychological well-being still have significant predictive power on both positive and negative aspects of functioning. These results are important from the point of view of both employers and employees, since the loss of work's meaningfulness may have significant repercussions both from the point of view of productivity (employer) and personal functioning of the employee.

KEYWORDS: meaning in life, meaningful work, subjective well-being, psychological well-being, depression.

PAGES:17-33