(1) Background: Subjective well-being (SWB) is an individual’s judgment about their overall well-being. Research has shown that high subjective well-being contributes to overall health. SWB consists of both Affective and Cognitive dimensions. Existing studies on SWB are limited in two major ways: first, they focused mainly on the Affective dimension. Second, most existing studies are focused on individuals from the Western and Asian nations; (2) Methods: To resolve these weaknesses and contribute to research on personalizing persuasive health interventions to promote SWB, we conducted a large-scale study of 732 participants from Nigeria to investigate what factors affect their SWB using both the Affective and Cognitive dimensions and how distinct SWB components relates to different gender and age group. We employed the Structural Equation Model (SEM) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) to develop models showing how gender and age relate to the distinct components of SWB; (3) Results: Our study reveals significant differences between gender and age groups. Males are more associated with social well-being and satisfaction with life components while females are more associated with emotional well-being. As regards age, younger adults (under 24) are more associated with social well-being and happiness while older adults (over 65) are more associated with psychological well-being, emotional well-being, and satisfaction with life. (4) Conclusions: The results could inform designers of the appropriate SWB components to target when personalizing persuasive health interventions to promote overall well-being for people belonging to various gender and age groups. We offer design guidelines for tailoring persuasive intervention to increase SWB based on an individual’s age and gender group. Finally, we map SWB components to possible persuasive technology design strategies that can be employed to implement them in persuasive interventions design.

The fact that individuals may react differently toward persuasive strategies gave birth to a shift in persuasive technology (PT) design from the one-size-fits-all traditional approach to the individualized approach which conforms to individuals’ preferences. Given that learners’ gender, age, and cognitive level can affect their response to different learning instructions, it is given primacy of place in persuasive educational technology (PET) design. However, the effect of gender, age, and cognitive ability on learners’ susceptibility to persuasive strategies did not receive the right attention in the extant literature. To close this gap, we carried out an empirical study among 461 participants to investigate whether learners’ gender, age, and cognitive ability significantly affect learners’ susceptibility to three key persuasive strategies (social learning, reward, and trustworthiness) in PETs. The results of a repeated measure analysis of variance (RM-ANOVA) revealed that people with high cognitive level are more likely to be susceptible to social learning, while people with low cognitive level are more likely to be susceptible to trustworthiness. Comparatively, our results revealed that males are more likely to be susceptible to social learning, while females are more likely to be susceptible to reward and trustworthiness. Furthermore, our results revealed that younger adults are more likely to be susceptible to social learning and reward, while older adults are more likely to be susceptible to trustworthiness. Our findings reveal potential persuasive strategies which designers can employ to personalize PTs to individual users in higher learning based on their susceptibility profile determined by age, gender, and cognitive level.

Subjective well-being (SWB) is an individual’s judgment about their overall well-being. Research has shown that activities that elevate people’s sense of SWB have a significant effect on their overall health. There are two dimensions of SWB: Affective and Cognitive dimensions. However, studies on SWB usually focus more on one dimension, ignoring the other dimension. Also, most existing studies on SWB focused on individuals from Western cultures. Research has shown that the influence of personality on the subjective well-being components is moderated by culture. Thus, to advance research in personalizing persuasive health interventions, this study focuses on Africans (n=732). Specifically, we investigate the relationship between the Big-Five personality traits and both dimensions of SWB using the constructs: Happiness, Satisfaction with Life, Social, Psychological and Emotional well-being. Our results reveal that to design PTs to promote SWB for people high in Agreeableness, designers should focus on designing to promote their feeling of Happiness and Social Well-being, while for Neuroticism, designers should focus on designing to promote Psychological well-being and Emotional well-being. Based on our findings, we offer guidelines for tailoring persuasive health interventions to promote individuals’ SWB based on their personality.

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