Exploring well-being among individuals with different life purposes in a Chinese context

ABSTRACT

What kind of life is the most worth living? Clarifying this question could help direct the development of life purposes to ultimately enhance well-being. We therefore explored whether certain life purposes are more related to well-being than other in a Chinese context. In Study 1, hierarchical regression analysis (N = 459) revealed that different life purposes were correlated with various levels of hedonic, eudaimonic, and social well-being. In Study 2, the results of in-depth interviews (N = 61) essentially confirmed and deepened the results of Study 1, revealing how these different purposes related to well-being. These two studies collectively suggest that social-oriented and intrinsic life purposes – such as social dedication, family harmony, and self-strengthening – are particularly correlated with greater well-being; by contrast, purposes such as social recognition, pleasure request, and quality improvement have no relevance to or are even negatively related to well-being.

KEYWORDS:

• Life purpose
• well-being
• Chinese context

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to all fellows who assisted us to give out the online questionnaire and all respondents for their assistance. We also want to thank Editage (www.editage.cn) for English language editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Geolocation information

This study was conducted at Southwest University (106.43 degrees east and 29.82 degrees north) and Shaanxi Normal University (108.88 degrees east and 34.16 degrees north).

Notes

1. As there were exceedingly few participants who had social dedication as the dominant purpose, we instead chose participants who had adopted it as their second or third most important purpose. In fact, in a previous study of ours with a larger sample (N = 1,238), only 0.8% of participants had social dedication as their dominant purpose.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (18ZDA333).