A psycho-social system approach to well-being: Empirically deriving the Five Domains of Positive Functioning

Abstract

A new psycho-social system approach to well-being is presented, in which psychological and social functioning is understood through an empirically derived framework of five domains. A quantitative co-term analysis was performed on 3466 terms within 18,401 PsycINFO^® journal documents on topics related to positive psychology (PP) across disciplines such as psychology, education, management, business and psychiatry. The analysis revealed that research on PP topics can be classified into five broad domains: attention and awareness, comprehension and coping, emotions, goals and habits, and virtues and relationships. These domains provide a new systematic framework, the Five Domains of Positive Functioning, for understanding positive psycho-social functioning and exploring the underlying ways in which people function to achieve well-being outcomes. When used within the psycho-social system approach, the framework can be used in future research to clarify mechanisms of change, facilitate comparisons between different PP interventions and suggest ways to improve intervention effectiveness.

Keywords:

• theory
• happiness
• text analysis
• intervention
• positive psychology
• framework
• latent semantic analysis
• well-being
• dynamic system

Acknowledgements

Certain data included herein are derived from the Web of Science® prepared by Thomson Reuters Scientific, Inc. (Thomson®), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA: © Copyright THOMSON REUTERS® 2012. All rights reserved. All data are used with permission.

Notes

1. This figure was calculated using data from a previous analysis by the present authors (Rusk & Waters, 2013).

2. In mathematical terms, this network was a graph, in which the terms formed the vertices and non-zero cosine similarities formed undirected edges that linked them.

3. It is noted that other factors outside this domain (e.g. social support) also influence coping. Like all the sub-domains, Sub-Domain 2.1 was linked to many of the terms throughout the map.