Understanding the impact of sharing gratitude on children’s sense of school belonging and mood

Abstract

Gratitude interventions are becoming an increasingly popular tool to enhance the social and emotional benefits of gratitude. Some research has proposed that gratitude interventions could be a suitable method to increase well-being amongst children, young people and young adults in education. However, questions remain over their effectiveness amongst this group. Additionally, focus has started to be placed on exploring differences between types of gratitude interventions to better understand how to accentuate the benefits of gratitude. As gratitude activities can differ in format and content, it may logically follow that they differentially impact psychological functioning and well-being.
In this thesis, I sought to explore these differences and gain a better understanding of this topic across a range of ages by carrying out two research enquiries. Chapter two presents a systematic review that examined the effectiveness of gratitude interventions on subjective well-being amongst 16-25-year-olds in education. It expanded upon previous reviews by also seeking to explore the effectiveness of different types of gratitude intervention amongst this population. Twenty-one randomised control trial studies, which compared a gratitude intervention to one or more control groups, were reviewed. Despite some mixed findings, overall, some promising positive trends for the effects of gratitude interventions on students in college or university education were found. There did not appear to be one type of intervention that stood out as more efficacious for this population than any others. Consideration of the authenticity of gratitude expression, students’ sense of autonomy and the response of the recipient as possible factors for effectiveness are also discussed.
Chapter three presents the empirical study, which explored the effects of gratitude diaries on sense of school belonging and mood, in particular understanding the effect of sharing gratitude with another. A further aim was to understand the implications of dispositional gratitude on the effectiveness of gratitude interventions with children. Participants (n =245), aged between 7 and 11 were randomly allocated to either complete a gratitude diary or neutral event diary for 4 weeks. Within each of these conditions, half were placed in a sharing condition, and the other in a non-sharing condition. Those in the sharing condition selected items from their diary each week, which were either their favourite (for those in the gratitude diary condition) or their most important learning moments (for those in the neutral event condition). These were shared with the researcher at the end of the intervention. Significant positive correlations between gratitude and sense of belonging, and gratitude and positive affect, suggested that as gratitude increased so did children’s positive mood and sense of belonging. A small intervention effect was found for children who completed a gratitude diary on positive affect, but no effect was found for sense of school belonging or negative affect. Sharing gratitude was not found to have enhanced the benefits of completing a gratitude diary along. Concerning the final research question, children with lower gratitude at the start of the intervention, did not appear to benefit more than those that started with higher gratitude.
Strengths, limitations and implications of both research papers are discussed and further recommendations for progressing research are discussed.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Colin Woodcock: orcid.org/0000-0002-9424-8466

ORCID for Catherine Brignell: orcid.org/0000-0001-7768-6272

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