Exploring social well-being amongst community environmental leaders: A qualitative study

• Autor(a) principal: Gonzalez Bustillo, Ivan Leonardo
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/20790
• topic: Environmental leadership; Community work; Bem-estar social -- Social welfare; Liderança ambiental; Trabalho comunitário

Social well-being results from the interactions human beings have along their life experience with other members of society, allowing them to evaluate their own well-being (Keyes, 1998). Considering the continuous social challenges faced by environmental leaders (Gallagher, 2012), the present study aimed to explore the social well-being of twelve community environmental leaders. Content analysis and rank-frequency methods were used to understand participants’ perspectives around social well-being and its five dimensions. The most relevant dimension for participants was social actualization; they associated social well-being with “Ability to develop”, “Community relationships” and “Making an impact” (related to the dimensions of social actualization, social integration and social contribution of Keyes’ theory) and evoked the new categories of “Natural environment” and “Human rights”. Among participants, social contribution was associated to personal attributes and social integration with trust. Personal growth appeared as the most relevant aspect of social actualization. Participants showed interest in understanding the way their communities are organized and cited hard work as the main attribute for accepting others. Finally, participants did not associate social integration with collective membership, did not refer to concrete actions when talking about social contribution and their perception as important members of their communities was not affected by having more than a year of community involvement, three findings that are in contrast with Keyes’ theory and experimental studies on social well-being. These results, although preliminary, inform about how this type of leaders experience social well-being while overcoming social challenges within the communities where they develop environmental solutions.