Recipes for Happiness: Conversations on Happiness and Well-being in the School Environment

Abstract

Background: Since ancient times, the debate around happiness has been present in philosophical reflections. In the face of an increasingly complex society, impacted by several crisis, the need and urgency to debate conceptualizations of happiness and well-being is evident, and educational institutions may play a relevant role in this process. Objective: Considering philosophical and current psychological perspectives on well-being, this paper seeks to analyze children’s perceptions of happiness through the analysis of an anthology of recipes for happiness created by elementary school children in a public school in Brazil. Methodology: A qualitative analysis was carried out based on the content of 15 recipes for happiness, produced by 6th grade students at a federal public school in Brazil. Content analysis was conducted associating the thematic categories of the article “children’s conceptualizations of happiness” with the ingredients of the recipes for happiness. Results: Among the corpus of recipes analyzed in the study, positive feelings were present in 86.7% of the recipes, followed by positive self (66.7%), then friendship (46.7%), and leisure (33.3%). Conclusion: The results demonstrate writing recipes for happiness can be considered an effective intervention to articulate the debate about well-being in the school environment. Furthermore, understanding children's perceptions of happiness can be important data for developing well-being policies in schools.