A Cross-Cultural Study of Happiness in Japanese, Finnish, and Mongolian Children: Analysis of the Sentence Completion Te
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A Cross-Cultural Study of Happiness in Japanese, Finnish, and Mongolian Children: Analysis of the Sentence Completion Test Yuki Ninomiya 1 & Mariko Matsumoto 1 & Asuka Nomura 1 & Lauri Kemppinen 2 & Dandii Odgerel 3 & Soili Keskinen 2 & Esko Keskinen 4 & Nergui Oyuntungalag 3 & Hiroko Tsuboi 5 & Nobuko Suzuki 6 & Chie Hatagaki 7 & Yutaka Fukui 1 & Miyako Morita 8 Accepted: 21 September 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Children’s happiness is an important issue that needs to be addressed around the world; however, limited research has explored how children define happiness. In this study, we conducted a survey of elementary school children living in different countries and clarified the contextual definitions of happiness by a total of 842 children (Mean age = 11.01, SD = 1.05, effective rate = 97.34%) from Grades 4 to 6 living in Japan (n = 474), Mongolia (n = 121), and Finland (n = 247). We investigated the definition of children’s happiness using the stimulus sentence completion test. For Mongolian children, happiness was predominantly characterized by references to family relationships. For Finnish children, happiness appeared to be linked to autonomous involvement with things, personal achievement, and success. Furthermore, the happiness of Japanese children was largely characterized by pleasant versus unpleasant experiences. In addition, Japanese children often referred to “being scolded” and their happiness was not related to school success. Our findings concurred with the elements of Seligman’s (2012) concept of flourishing as a new criterion for judging well-being. It was also suggested that the dominant elements of happiness may differ depending on an individual’s country and culture. Keywords School-aged children . Happiness . Unhappiness . Cross-cultural perceptions .
Text mining . Sentence completion test
* Yuki Ninomiya [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
Y. Ninomiya et al.
1 Introduction Approximately 30 years have passed since the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989; children around the world continue to face poverty, exposure to conflict, lack of educational opportunities, and abuse. According to the international Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Save the Children, 40 million children received direct support from them in 2018 (Save the Children International 2019). Children’s happiness is also threatened in developed countries that are materially and technologically advanced. For example, surveys using objective indicators point to the problems of the relative poverty rate of children, the poverty gap, and material deprivation in countries like United States, Italy, and Japan (UNICEF Office of Research 2013), which suggest that even in developed countries, there are many children living in poor or dangerous environments. Moreover, youth suicide is a serious problem worldwide. In high-income countries, suicide was the leading cause of death for young men and women
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