The Journal of College & University Student Housing Vol. 47 No. 1 - 17

Promoting Students' Strengths

normed on a sample of 759 undergraduate
college students (Karris & Craighead, 2012).

Satisfaction with Life Scale. The Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener et al., 1985) is a
5-item scale designed to measure the global
cognitive judgments of one's subjective wellbeing. Participants indicate their responses for
each of the five items on a 7-point Likert-type
scale (Diener et al., 1985). Overall scores on
this scale range from 5 to 35, with higher scores
indicating higher levels of subjective well-being. This measure has been shown to be both
valid and reliable around the world with a wide
variety of age groups and applications; the
scale shows internal consistency with Cronbach's alpha of .87 and test-retest correlation
of .82 (Pavot et al., 1991).
Social group participation. The researchers
created a social group participation item based
on a review of literature regarding college
student social group activity and participation. A group of counseling experts reviewed
and revised the item response options. The
researchers reviewed a list of student clubs
and organizations available at the university at
which the study was conducted and organized
these social associations into thematic groups
that included the following: university clubs,
societies, leadership, engagement, fraternity/
sorority affiliation, NCAA Division I athletics,
intramural activities, student government, religious and spiritual organizations, community
organizations, and other participation. Participants were prompted, " Please check the social
groups you are currently involved with " and
provided a list of seven thematic groups and
an " Other " option. Responses were summed
to yield an index of overall social group
participation.

Data Analysis
We used SPSS software 22.0 version to conduct
data analyses. This included descriptive statistics, frequency statistics, and Pearson productmoment correlations. Descriptive and frequency
statistics were used to describe demographic
characteristics as well as participants' involvement in social groups. The Pearson productmoment correlations were used to assess the
strength of a linear association between variables. All assumptions underlying these statistical techniques were met. Only one significant
outlier was identified, and it was removed from
the data.
We computed a Pearson product-moment
correlation to assess the relationship between
the character strengths of love, hope, zest, and
curiosity and subjective well-being; between
social group participation and subjective
well-being; and between the four character
strengths and social group participation.

Character strengths and subjective well-being. Preliminary analysis showed the relationship to be linear with both variables normally
distributed, as assessed by the Shapiro-Wilk
test (p > .05). As shown in Table 2, results
revealed a moderate positive correlation
between subjective well-being and love, r(250)
= .467, p < .01, with love explaining 22% of
the variation in well-being; a moderate positive correlation between subjective well-being
and hope, r(250) = .357, p < .01, with hope explaining 13% of the variation in well-being; a
moderate positive correlation between subjective well-being and curiosity, r(250) = .387, p <
.01, with curiosity explaining 15% of the variation in well-being; and a moderate positive
correlation between subjective well-being and
zest, r(250) = .429, p < .01, with zest explainV O L U M E 4 7 , NO. 1 * 2 0 2 0

Journal of College & University Student Housing Vol. 47 No. 1

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