Evans Garey

RELIGIOUS PROBLEM SOLVING STYLE AND LIFE SATISFACTION IN

ADOLESCENTS

ADOLESCENCE

• Adolescence is a period of opportunities and challenges

• It is a time of youthfulness, vitality, and enthusiasm

• But also full of challenges

• During adolescence young people are facing many changes in terms of their developmental period

• They also have to face many changes that happen in the world

ADOLESCENTS IN INDONESIA

• Indonesia is a developing country

• There were so many changes happened in recent years (eg. Politic, Economy, Education)

• These changes bring pressure for many adolescent

ADOLESCENT

• In 2011, it was estimated that over than 2,5 million Indonesian youth age 7-15 years old could not go to school because of economic condition (UNICEF, 2012).

• Students were complainining about school

• Only limited studies that have been conducted in Indonesia to investigate adolescent wellbeing

LIFE SATISFACTION

• Life satisfaction was define as individual’s cognitive evaluation of life.

• How a person view the positive in his/her life will determine how satisfied someone with his/her life

• Adolescents who reported having high level of life satisfaction have been found to have high score in their academic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal skills (Gilman & Huebner, 2003; Proctor, Linley, Maltby, 2010)

• Adolescents who have a very high life satisfaction have been found to have lower level of depression, anxiety, stress, and negative emotion (Gilman & Huebner, 2003; Proctor et al., 2010).

ADOLESCENT LIFE SATISFACTION

• Studies show that despite of the pressure that adolescents have to face, their well-being were still intact

• Garey & Anggraini (2015) found that Indonesian adolescents life satisfaction relatively high

• Even for adolescents with economic difficulty

• What are the factors that contribute to adolescent life satisfaction?

RELIGIOSITY

• Garey (2015) conducted an interview to 4 adolescents, asking questions such as what are the cause of your life condition (eg. economy, ) right now?

• They were referring to God as the causal factor of their life circumstances

• I concluded that the belief in God plays an important role in adolescents life

• World Values Survey (Ingleheart, 2010) had found that 90% Indonesian considered God as important in their life

RELIGIOUS PROBLEM SOLVING STYLE

• Religious problem solving was define as ways of understanding and dealing with negative life events that are related to the sacred/God (Pargament & Raiya, 2007).

• Religious problem solving style consist of three style:– Collaborative– Deffering– Self-directive

PURPOSE• The purpose of this study is to investigate the association between

religious problem solving style and life satisfaction

• Hypotheses: there is a relationship between religious problem solving style and life satisfaction in adolescents

METHOD

• Sample: 189 adolescents (age 13-15) who come from one private Christian school in Jakarta

• Instrument: Religious Problem Solving Scale (Pargament, et al, 1988) & Brief Multidimensional Student Life Satisfaction Scale-PTPB (Bickman, Athay, Riener, Lambert, Kelley, Breda,..Andrade, 2010)

• Religious Problem Solving Scale has 12 items with 3 item for each scale with 4 point response option

• BMSLSS-PTPB has 5 items with 5 point response option

METHOD

• Cronbach’s alpha for Religious Problem Style respectively were– Collaborative style: .76– Deffering style: .69– Self-directive style: .79

• Cronbach’s alpha for BMSLSS-PTPB was .74

• Statistical Analysis: we used Pearson Correlation to measure the association between religious problem solving style and life satisfaction

RESULT

Mean SD

LS 19.88 3.017

Collaborative 8.79 1.850

Deffering 7.09 2.123

Self-directive 6.21 1.864

RESULTLS Collaborative Deffering Self-directive

LSSig (2-tailed)N

1

189

CollaborativeSig (2-tailed)N

.260**.000189

1

189

DefferingSig (2-tailed)N

-.010.892189

.078

.286189

1

189

Self-directiveSig (2-tailed)N

-.101.165189

-.579**.000189

.066

.364189

1

189

**. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed)

DISCUSSION

• Adolescents who were participated in this research tends to have a relatively high life satisfaction

• Adolescents tend to use collaborative style in coping rather than deffering or self-directive

DISCUSSION

• This research showed that there was a positive correlation between life satisfaction score and collaborative style score

• Adolescents who perceived them selves working together with God in coping with problem appeared to be satisfied with their life.

• This finding consistent with the previous findings ( Bjork , et al. 2010; Pargament, et al. 1988; Tadie, 2010)

DISCUSSION

• These coping styles relates to further attributions to the nature of God (Hood, Hill, Spilka, 2009)

• The collaborative style adolescents have the tendency to view God has control over their life along with their personal sense of control.

• We saw the collaborative style as having an external control and internal control in somewhat degree

• We tend to be happy when we see ourselves in control

DISCUSSION

• The deffering style and self-directive style did not show to be associated with life satisfaction

• This finding showed that neither God nor self are able to stand alone in affecting adolescents well-being

• This finding suggest that it was God and human as co-worker might affect adolescents well-being

DISCUSSION

• The notion of God and man working together is harmonious with the teaching of Christian faith

• In Christian teaching, one was taught to rely on God and also he/she has to prepare and must be diligently working all the time

• Further study is needed to investigate the acclaimed that God and us working together in different religion such as Islam

DISCUSSION

• Utilizing collaborative style in counseling might be helpful in order to maintain adolescents well-being

• Addressing God and his positive quality might be useful in working with religious adolescents in counselling

LIMITATIONS

• The fact that the participants come from one specific religion must be considered in interpreting the result of this research

• Due to the multidimension of religiosity, generalization for the effect of religiosity must be carefully taken