Meaningful Need Research Articles

Interrogating Christian and Muslim responses to COVID-19 in Nigeria

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the far-reaching significance of religion in shaping human interaction within social crises. Efforts to slow down the spread of coronavirus prompted different national governments, including the Federal Government of Nigeria to restrict large density gatherings, enforce lockdowns and promote social distancing, which were largely resisted initially. Organised religion may have influenced citizens’ compliance with government directives for curbing the pandemic. Focussing largely on providing economic assistance to people in need, it may have missed out on the reason for recourse to faith. One outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic was the need to understand the application of religious faith in explaining epidemics and health crises. This work predominantly relies on data from secondary sources (library research and internet materials). Just as it critically investigates Christian-Muslim responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, it seeks also to justify reliance on religion during a health emergency. By the evaluative method of philosophy, we show that although the pandemic triggered dread of annihilation, it brought in its wake a search for ontological meaningfulness. This study therefore argues that Nigerians turned to religion to meet the deep-seated, individual need for meaningfulness (‘survivability’) that is primary to the need of soul and body, which includes material donations by organised religious entities. The primacy of fulfilling this need precedes sociality both ontologically and epistemologically because meaningfulness is an inalienable property of individuality.Contribution: This work presents religion as a rationally defensible need that is fundamentally rooted in individual human nature, even in a pandemic; religion pertains to meaningfulness, which counters human fear of annihilation and meaninglessness.

Experiencing Meaningful Work through Corporate Volunteering: The Other as a Source of Meaning

AbstractGlobal social, ecological and economic crises are contributing to the need for meaningfulness in different spheres of life, including work, as an increasing concern to employees. However, the current understanding of meaningfulness is bound by its normativity and thus does not meet the uncertainty present in today’s work. We utilize the Levinasian concept of “the Other” to provide a non-normative conceptualization of meaningfulness in the context of corporate volunteering (CV) and empirically explore work meaningfulness in CV projects in Poland and Finland. We find work meaningfulness to arise from proximity to the Other and the otherness of the Other. Our study contributes to the discussion on meaningful work in the fields of business ethics and management studies through a non-normative reconceptualization of meaningfulness.

Meaningfulness and attachment: what dreams, psychosis and psychedelic states tell us about our need for connection.

The human need to find meaning in life and the human need for connection may be two sides of the same coin, a coin forged in the developmental crucible of attachment. Our need for meaningfulness can be traced to our developmental need for connection in the attachment relationship. The free energy principle dictates that in order to resist a natural tendency towards disorder self-organizing systems must generate models that predict the hidden causes of phenomenal experience. In other words, they must make sense of things. In both an evolutionary and ontogenetic sense, the narrative self develops as a model that makes sense of experience. However, the self-model skews the interpretation of experience towards that which is predictable, or already "known." One may say it causes us to "take things personally." Meaning is felt more acutely when defenses are compromised, when the narrative self is offline. This enables meaning-making that is less egocentrically motivated. Dreams, psychosis, and psychedelic states offer glimpses of how we make sense of things absent a coherent narrative self. This has implications for the way we understand such states, and lays bare the powerful reach of attachment in shaping what we experience as meaningful.

How to Run a Meeting.

How to Run a Meeting.

Meaning and Late-Life Vulnerability: A Philosophical Practice-Based Approach

The quest for meaning constitutes one of the fundamental human existential motivations. At first glance, late life vulnerability appears to pose a threat to meaningfulness. Sources of meaning associated with certain activities or relations may seem less accessible once vulnerabilities, caused by social losses or diminishing health, start to dominate people’s daily life experience. On the other hand, some theorists have argued that it is particularly in the confrontation with our human vulnerability that the need for meaningfulness is most urgently felt. This paper presents a philosophical-conceptual exploration of meaning as a dynamic, context-dependent social practice. Contrasting theoretical approaches that analyse meaningfulness and/or meaninglessness in terms of the presence or absence of certain components or qualities, a practice-based approach enhances our sensivitity for concrete ways in which people manage to find or create meaning in situations of vulnerability, thereby integrating this vulnerability in their life narratives and sense of self.

Basic psychological need satisfaction mediates the relationship between engaging leadership and work engagement: A cross‐national study

AbstractThe current study investigates the mediating role of basic psychological need for satisfaction at work (i.e., autonomy, relatedness, and competence) in the relationship between engaging leadership (i.e., inspiring, strengthening, empowering, and connecting) and work engagement. Also, we are proposing and testing an additional need for meaningfulness that plays a similar mediating role. Data were collected from two independent samples from Indonesia (n = 607 state‐owned company employees) and Russia (n = 384 civil servants). Results of both samples confirmed that basic psychological need satisfaction (autonomy, relatedness, competence, and meaningfulness) mediated the relationship between engaging leadership and work engagement. Multigroup analysis revealed that the parameters of the mediation model were invariant across both national samples, supporting the cross‐national validity of the model. When the mediating role of the satisfaction of the need for meaningfulness was tested separately, this appeared only the case in the Russian and not in the Indonesian sample.

Are We All on the Same Page? Using Data and Dialogue to Understand Nonprofit Capacity Building

Although scholarly measurement of nonprofit capacities has been a key element in the search for effective and sustainable capacity building efforts, practitioners recognize and struggle with definitions and perceptions that remain ambiguous. To date, few studies have embraced these important conceptual tensions, especially from the perspectives of multiple stakeholders in an effort to integrate and triangulate findings in a more applied context. Our study provides a lens on why both research and practice may be applying highly contextual definitions that our data show as not being broadly generalizable across nonprofit subsectors and important stakeholder groups. Our analyses demonstrate that capacity building may not be one-size- fits-all, with no easy, transferable pattern stemming from a survey-driven assessment of nonprofit capacities. Our qualitative analyses of focus groups and a day- long dialog of stakeholders including foundation funders, business funders, government funders, individual donors, nonprofits, and nonprofit capacity building consultants illuminate that there is a meaningful need for a deeper understanding of multiple perspectives of both capacity and capacity building across stakeholder groups.

A systematic review of mental health outcome measures for young people aged 12 to 25 years.

BackgroundMental health outcome measures are used to monitor the quality and effectiveness of mental health services. There is also a growing expectation for implementation of routine measurement and measures being used by clinicians as a feedback monitoring system to improve client outcomes. The recent focus in Australia and elsewhere targeting mental health services to young people aged 12–25 years has meant that outcome measures relevant to this age range are now needed. This is a shift from the traditional divide of child and adolescent services versus adult services with a transitioning age at 18 years. This systematic review is the first to examine mental health outcome measures that are appropriate for the 12 to 25 year age range.MethodsMEDLINE and PsychINFO databases were systematically searched to identify studies using mental health outcome measures with young people aged 12 to 25 years. The search strategy complied with the relevant sections of the PRISMA statement.ResultsA total of 184 published articles were identified, covering 29 different outcome measures. The measures were organised into domains that consisted of eight measures of cognition and emotion, nine functioning measures, six quality of life measures, and six multidimensional mental health measures. No measures were designed specifically for young people aged 12 to 25 years and only two had been used by clinicians as a feedback monitoring system. Five measures had been used across the whole 12 to 25 year age range, in a range of mental health settings and were deemed most appropriate for this age group.ConclusionsWith changes to mental health service systems that increasingly focus on early intervention in adolescence and young adulthood, there is a need for outcome measures designed specifically for those aged 12 to 25 years. In particular, multidimensional measures that are clinically meaningful need to be developed to ensure quality and effectiveness in youth mental health. Additionally, outcome measures can be clinically useful when designed to be used within routine feedback monitoring systems.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12888-015-0664-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The Experience of Tedium in Life and Work

Tedium, the experience of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion, was introduced. It was assumed to stem from chronic daily pressures. Tedium was predicted to be related to: (1) internal features which include pressures inherent in the individual's roles and imposed on the cognitive capacity and the need for meaningfulness and achievement; and (2) external features which include pressures imposed on the individual by the physical, organizational, and social environment. A trilogy of studies designed to develop a tedium measure, to test its reliability and validity, and to study its relationships to internal and external life and work features was presented. It was concluded that tedium is a highly relevant psychological construct, experienced in its extreme form by 6% of the people studied (N = 1187). Tedium was found to be a significant correlate of both internal and external life and work features. The comparison between life and work features showed that the former are more highly related to tedium than the latter. Life was also found to be a higher source of rewards and a lower source of pressures relative to work. The need to develop a more rigorous causal model of tedium was stressed.