A Comparative Study of Happiness among Secondary School Students with Reference to Gender and Types of School

Abstract

The present research was carried out to investigate the happiness level of secondary school students in terms of gender and type of school. Happiness is conducive to students’ psychological health, academic adaptability, emotional adjustment and healthy development. For students at the secondary level in India, academics is a source of stress and social acceptance or rejection could also be a factor to reckon with resulting them facing difficulty feeling happy. The research employed descriptive survey design to examine gender and school types (government/private) differences of happiness among male and female students. The sample for the study consisted of 600 secondary school students drawn from four districts of Haryana, employing a stratified random sampling method to bring in proportionate representation on lineaments like sex and type of schools. The research tool selected for the measure of students’ happiness was The Happiness Scale by Bhardwaj and Das (2017). Descriptive analysis was the first step in understanding general levels of happiness by comparing means for gender and type of school with independent t-tests. The results show that there was no significant difference in overall happiness between male and female high school students. The female students had a little bit better mean score, however this difference is not statistically significant. Equivalent results were seen for students attending government versus private schools with mean (of happiness scores) very close to each other. Such findings show that gender and type of school themselves are not too important in happiness among secondary school students. The findings suggest that psychological well-being in general and happiness in particular is a personal trait with a relatively stable rate over time, which, according to the results of this study, appears to be more influenced by psychosocial factors (school climate, social relations or emotional support) than personal data or institutional data. The results underscore the importance of implementing universal well-being and happiness-based interventions across all schools that foster students’ integrated development.