The Meaningful Activity Wants and Needs Assessment: A Perspective on Life Balance

Abstract

The concept of life balance has received growing attention as a way to understand human well-being. Within this paper a novel subjective definition of life balance is proposed, such that persons should evaluate their ongoing occupations as meaningful while concurrently not perceiving a substantive need for more meaning in their occupations. The Meaningful Activity Wants and Needs Assessment (MAWNA) taps a need for meaningful occupation. It was introduced and tested in a sample of 250 university graduate and undergraduate students as a requisite assessment tool aimed at operationalizing this conceptual approach. The MAWNA demonstrated an anticipated three-factor structure composed of competence and goal achievement, pleasure and enjoyment, and social connectedness meanings associated with occupation. Further psychometric evidence in support of the MAWNA included very good internal consistency and test-retest reliabilities, in addition to discriminant and convergent validity identified through its correlations with meaningful activity and indicators of well-being. In regression models, both the MAWNA and a measure of meaningful occupation added statistically significant contributions towards explaining indicators of well-being thereby offering initial support for the definition of life balance proposed in this paper.

Keywords:

• Life balance
• Well-being
• Meaning
• Evaluation

Acknowledgements

Portions of this paper were presented at the 9th Council of Occupational Therapists for the European Countries (COTEC) Congress of Occupational Therapy in Stockholm, Sweden in 2012.