Walls of Well-Being (WOWs): a Pilot Study of a New Methodology to Explore Children’s and Adolescents’ Perceived Sources of Happiness

Abstract

Lay theories are everyday explanations and attributions given for psychological phenomena. They are important because they affect people’s behaviours and cognitions. Lay theories have typically been studied using interviews and surveys of individuals. We describe a pilot study that employed a new, community-based, methodology that we used to explore children’s and adolescents’ lay theories of happiness. We collected 802 responses to the phrase “I feel happy when ______” which was stencilled repeatedly on large walls we called Walls of Well-Being (WOWs) installed in a kindergarten-elementary school and a junior-high school. An interpretive, grounded theory approach for coding these qualitative data was used. Five main themes emerged in the children/adolescents’ responses: Activities, Relationships, Other Oriented, Personal Feelings, and Receiving. Chi-square analyses revealed significant differences in the prevalence of response themes between the two schools demonstrating that the WOWs are sensitive to community differences. Advantages and disadvantages of the WOWs methodology are discussed as well as suggestions for mitigating disadvantages in future studies utilizing WOWs. This new method holds promise as an assessment tool that could be applied across a wide range of psychological phenomena (e.g., gratitude and hope) and environments (e.g., hospitals and businesses).