Understanding and Promoting School Satisfaction in Children and Adolescents

Abstract

In the fi rst edition of this handbook, Baker and Maupin (2009) conveyed that school satisfaction refers to a student’s subjective cognitive appraisal of the quality of his or herschool life. School satisfaction is perhaps best understood in the larger context of wellness indicators. In brief, global life satisfaction, a common indicator of happiness, refers to one’s cognitive appraisal of the overall quality of his or her life (see Gilman and Huebner, this edition). When making such overall judgments of personal well-being, individuals vary in which aspects of their lives they consider most; for example, some people emphasize fi nancial status while others weigh relationship qualities most heavily. The domains deemed to be most salient to global life satisfaction are largely a function of one’s developmental level. Early investigations of the areas of life that infl uence global life satisfaction appraisals among American youth implicated fi ve core domains: family, friendships, living environment, self, and school (Huebner, 1994). Satisfaction in each domain is empirically linked to global life satisfaction (Seligson, Huebner, & Valois, 2003). Recent research on the Personal Wellbeing Index (PWI) among Australian adolescents confi rmed that the School Children form of the PWI differs from the Adult form in the necessary inclusion of school as a contributing domain to global life satisfaction (Tomyn & Cummins, 2011). Specifi cally, Australian adolescents’ satisfaction with school predicted their global life satisfaction above and beyond the contributions of the other seven domains of life (e.g., health, safety, achievements, future security) historically assessed with the PWI. School satisfaction appears to be a particularly strong contributor of life satisfaction among some subgroups of youth, including Korean secondary students (Park & Huebner, 2005), gifted American middle school students (Ash & Huebner, 1998), adolescent Norwegian girls (Danielson, Samdal, Hetland, & Wold, 2009), and adolescent boys in urban schools (Vera et al., 2012).