A Working Well-Being: The Individual’s Relation to Their Job Relates to Their Well-Being

Abstract: Work takes up a lot of our time and a third of our lives. The purpose of this study is to examine how an individual’s view of their work relates to their well-being. The study uses a survey to explore what views of the job that the participants (N = 240) have. Job satisfaction was measured with semantic measures, that is open-ended questions analysed with AI, and the Generic Job satisfaction Scale. The Satisfaction With Life Scale and the Harmony In Life Scale measured participants’ well-being. Analyses of the semantic measures showed that words such as money described job satisfaction and stress described dissatisfaction (t(2630)=46.48, p<.001). The semantic similarity scores between described personal job satisfaction and a job satisfaction word norm (participant generated text that describes high job satisfaction) correlated with the Generic Job Satisfaction scale (r = .55) the strongest; hence this can be seen as a new word-based measure of job satisfaction, as an alternative to numeric scales. The semantic similarity scores correlated significantly with all numeric scales (r = .35 to r = .55, p<.001) and word-responses significantly predicted numeric scales (r = .38 to r =.58, p<.001). Participants described their job-satisfaction with words such as rewarding, happy and challenging. The study demonstrates how a person’s view of their work is connected to their subjective well-being.