Besides That I'm Ok: Well-Being in Caribbean and American Adolescents and Youth

Abstract

A total of 235 adolescents and college students from Aruba, St. Lucia, Tennessee, and Alabama participated in this study that measured various aspects of wellbeing. The Life Factors Questionnaire measured participants' responses on such self-reported measures as health, intelligence, subjective well-being, responses to stress, optimism, depressive symptoms, and on several open-ended queries of participants' perceptions on life goals, role models, and important values. Results show that overall groups were quite similar on most of the well-being variables measured. Older participants tended to report more depressive symptoms than their younger counterparts. American adolescents and college students had more depressive symptoms than their Caribbean counterparts. Seventh-Day Adventist adolescents reported twice as many depressive symptoms than students from different religious affiliations (Roman Catholic and other religions).

Association between the dispositional optimism and depression in young people: a systematic review and meta-analysis

“…On the other hand, all the studies with low methodological quality were characterized by having nonrepresentative samples in relation to the target population and using non-probabilistic sampling to select participants (Chin & Holden, 2013;Hinkle & Quiton, 2019;Kaiser & Malik, 2015;Kube, Anna, et al, 2018;Morris et al, 2010;Morton et al, 2014;Weber et al, 2010;Wong & Lim, 2009). Likewise, 2 studies did not report the validation of the measurement instruments (Hinkle & Quiton, 2019;Kaiser & Malik, 2015) and 2 analyzed only one confounding factor relevant to the analysis of the data (Morris et al, 2010;Weber et al, 2010). The total scores and those of each criterion proposed by the NOS appear in Fig.…”