Angelina Wilson Fadiji

• Doctor of Philosophy Psychology
• Senior Lecturer at De Montfort University

This study reports on the synergistic liaison between student wellbeing and academic support in higher education. The study took place at a large, urban university in South Africa within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Brief interviews were conducted between September and November 2021, with undergraduate students (n = 645, Mage = 22; SD = 2)...

Despite the immense interruptions to relationships and family life during the COVID-19 pandemic, only a few studies explicitly focused on family wellbeing. Therefore, the present study aimed to synthesize current evidence in the African context to provide a state-of-the-art representation of the pandemic's impact on family wellbeing. Using a scopin...

International students are susceptible to threats to their well-being, as their immigrant status in host societies exposes them to unique challenges such as language difficulties, cultural differences, social isolation, and discrimination (to list a few). Relationships are an important component of individuals’ well-being that can mitigate these ch...

Although higher education students have been identified as one of the social groups most affected by the impact of COVID-19, higher education literature appears to focus more on documenting implications for teaching and learning, curriculum and institutions, than student wellbeing. This has resulted in gaps to our understanding and approaches to in...

Antecedents of wellbeing across different socio-cultural contexts is a question that psychologists and other social scientist continue to grapple with. Although evidence supporting higher educational levels as being beneficial for wellbeing is significant, there are still contradictory findings, necessitating further exploration into this relations...

Positive Psychology rapidly developed into an influential field of study and intervention, initially situated in Psychology, and later becoming multidisciplinary. Research interest in the study of (psychological) well-being has gained global popularity, with increasing salience in Africa. Although the global trends of these developments are relativ...

Religious commitment is a prominent feature in the lives of many students in Africa. The present study investigated the well-being correlates (emotional well-being, social contribution, and depression) of religious commitment, and compared them across sex. A cross-sectional sample of 471 students from South Africa and Kenya (men = 244; women = 227;...

Violence has become a regular occurrence in the context of the South African student movement. However, to date there are no studies that investigate student wellbeing in the context of student movement violence. How are violence and wellbeing experienced in the context of the student movement? What resources do students draw upon to protect or res...

In this longitudinal study, we examine changes in psychological distress and multidimensional well-being from before to during the COVID-19 pandemic among South African adults. As a secondary purpose, we explore whether pre-pandemic flourishing is protective against subsequent psychological distress during the public health crisis. The analytic sam...

The present study examined the relationship between the demographic characteristics of age, sex, religious practice, and standard of living with life satisfaction and meaning in life in a Ghanaian setting. Participants were 394 Ghanaian urban adults (female = 43.90; mean age = 40.84 years, SD = 11.20 years). Participants completed a socio-demograph...

Harmony is regarded as important for well-being in many cultures. However, (cultural) differences in the meanings and manifestations of harmony may impact the equivalence of measures of harmony in life, as well as the associations between harmony and other well-being constructs. This study aimed to investigate the factorial, convergent and divergen...

Studies have proven that meaning-making in times of crisis serves as a buffer against negative experiences. What is unknown is the extent to which—in the unfamiliar context of a pandemic—meaning-making might have fostered the psychological wellbeing of South African University students during a critical period of emerging adulthood. To address this...

Introduction The aim of the present study was to explore the relationship between satisfaction with life and mathematics achievement among a nationally representative sample of Grade 9 learners in South Africa. Methods Using the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS 2019) based on a sample of 20,829 learners (females = 11,067 and males =...

At first a small student protest against high fees at Wits University and the lack of government funding for higher education, the #FeesMustFall movement spread quickly, and violently, to other South African campuses. #FeesMustFall tells the gripping story of the student activists' experiences during a year-long struggle that began in October 2015...

The book "Restoring wellbeing after student protests: Lessons from #FeesMustFall and its aftermath" starts with a moving historical account of our collective trauma of student activism and university unrest of 2015/2016 in South Africa, but even more so it offers us lessons learnt - lessons that are critical for Student Affairs and higher education...

The dual-continua model of mental health provides a contemporary framework for conceptualising and operationalising mental health. According to this model, mental health is distinct from but related to mental illness, and not the opposite or merely the absence of psychopathology symptoms. To examine the validity of the dual-continua model, previous...

Religiosity is widespread in Africa and permeates the life of the continent’s young adults in ways yet to be fully understood. It is unclear what meanings young Africans perceive with their religiosity or the pathways to experiencing meaning. Therefore, we investigated the role of religious commitment in the search for and experience of meaning amo...

Psychology is concerned with human behaviour, therefore all psychologies are contextually-embedded and culturally informed. A movement towards globalising psychology would invariably diminish the localised socio-cultural situatedness of psychology, and instead seek to advance a dominant Euro-American centred psychology even in regions where such ap...

Positive mental health, and the validity of its assessment instruments, are largely unexplored in the Ghanaian context. This study examined the factor structure of the Twi version of the Mental Health Continuum-Short Form and explored the prevalence of positive mental health in a sample of rural Ghanaian adults (N = 444). A bifactor exploratory str...

Harmony is recognized as fundamental to being and functioning well in philosophical traditions and empirical research globally and in Africa. The aim of this study was to explore and describe harmony as a quality of happiness in South Africa (N = 585) and Ghana (N = 420). Using a qualitative descriptive research design, participants’ responses to a...

This chapter presents an exploration of the nature of student goals and obstacles, and the role played by meaning in life and hope thinking in distinguishing them. Male and female (n = 101) students between 18 and 34 years (mean = 22 years) participated in a concurrent equal status, exploratory, mixed-method design study. They were asked about the...

This study explored the extent to which the relationship between family values and social well-being is explained by well-being orientations. We investigated whether hedonic and eudaimonic motives for activities mediate the effect of family values of roles hierarchy and kin relations on social well-being. Using a cross-sectional survey design, rand...

Although several theories and studies have explored human strengths and mental well‐being at the global level, these insights are rarely tested and translated into practice in sub‐Saharan Africa. This study aims to describe the development of a 10‐session multicomponent positive psychology intervention, the Inspired Life Program (ILP), designed to...

In this paper, we critically reflect on our conceptualization and operationalization of "rapid photovoice" as a close-up, emanci-patory, action research methodology which has multiple, intersecting social-justice goals; and consider the methodology's potential for helping to achieve such goals. We first consider photovoice in relation to its typica...

Extant literature has demonstrated the importance of individual and school-related factors in improving mathematics achievement. Despite this, there is still a gap in research to understand the mediating role of educational aspiration in mathematics achievement. The aim of the present study is to test the relationship between self-efficacy, school...

Introduction: There is growing evidence that group-based mental health intervention programmes can encourage the development of peer support, psychosocial skills, and collaborative therapeutic relationships with longer lasting effects. This study explored participants’ experiences of, perceived benefits of, and recommendations to improve a 10-sessi...

Afrocentric paradigms reflect assumptions of the overarching importance of interconnectedness and social bonds in meaningful experiences. It is, however, not known if types of relatedness vary in importance as meaning sources in the subjective experiences of laypeople, or what the reasons are that they ascribe to the importance of relationships. Th...

Background Mental health is considered an integral part of human health. Reliable and valid measurement instruments are needed to assess various facets of mental health in the native language of the people involved. This paper reports on five studies examining evidence for the factorial validity of the Twi versions of five mental health and well-be...

Background There is growing evidence that positive psychology interventions (PPIs) enhance positive mental health and lead to a decrease in symptoms of psychopathology. This study examines the effectiveness of a 10‐week multicomponent PPI (the Inspired Life Program ; ILP) in promoting positive mental health and reducing symptoms of depression and...

Cultural norm conformity shapes the structure of societies and accounts for group differences in the psychological functioning of individuals across cultures. This study investigated the moderating role of cultural tightness–looseness in the relationship between well-being orientations and time perspective dimensions. Participants (N = 744) from Ke...

An extensive body of research exists on the background characteristics that predict learner achievement. However, in South Africa, little attention has been paid to the level of educational aspirations and the factors that shape the level of aspirations. Using a bio-ecological systems theory of development, we explored the role of gender, socio-eco...

Worldwide, countries have to respond to local and global socio-technological shifts and needs, specifically the transformations wrought by a rapidly shifting understanding of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Science, technology and innovation policy (STI) finds itself at the intersection of these local and global challenges. 'Innovation Policy at...

The authors would like to correct an error in Table 2 of the published article. This table presents the model fit indices for each of the models tested for the SWLS and the MLQ. In the table, we indicated that the CFI fit indices for MLQ model 3 was .052.

Socio-historical context and ideology are often overlooked in analyses of how social welfare policy is used to promote well-being. This paper uses the South African Child Support Grant (CSG) to illuminate how a policy may enhance or hinder well-being, not only for individuals but also for a society. Forged through a combination of the inherited apa...

The aim of this study was to explore the measurement and conceptualisation of well-being within the Ghanaian socio-cultural setting. In addition to testing the structural validity of two commonly used well-being scales, the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) and the Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ) among Ghanaian adults, we explored Ghanaian pe...

The present study aimed to describe the reasons for the importance of relationships for older individuals living in urban and rural sites in South Africa. Participants were selected from urban (n = 50, males = 14, females = 36; mean age = 70, SD = 8.35) and rural (n = 50; males = 16 females = 34; mean age = 67, SD = 5.31) areas in the North West Pr...

Against the backdrop of scant research on the relationship between socio-demographic characteristics and positive mental health in Ghana, the aim of the current study was twofold: Firstly, to test a hypothesised model of positive mental health across gender and to determine gender differences in the structural relations for hope, perceptions of sup...

The subject of human well-being continues to gain traction in disciplines as diverse as psychology, sociology, development studies, and economics. Current scholarship , however, is still largely framed by normative assumptions about what being well means, and the overwhelming majority of conceptual approaches to well-being being have been conceived...

The subject of human well-being continues to gain traction in disciplines as diverse as psychology, sociology, development studies, and economics. Current scholarship, however, is still largely framed by normative assumptions about what being well means, and the overwhelming majority of conceptual approaches to well-being being have been conceived...

In the rapidly expanding field of positive psychology, a core question is now what the relationships among various positive constructs are and how we can understand this in various contexts. We aimed to explore the possible nomological network linking the constructs hope, goals, and meaning from a bottom-up Africentric perspective in two African co...

The aim of the present study was to explore and describe the goals and motivations underlying them for adults living in rural African contexts using an inductive approach. Seventy participants (n = 25 males, n = 45 females) between 43 and 89 years (mean age 60.85 years) were selected from a total of N = 537 residing in the rural Ganyesa and Tlakgam...

Social equality has emerged as one of the important ideals of human society, especially for development. Moreover, education has featured prominently among the many key drivers of equality. However, in developing nations like Ghana, education represents one of the areas in which gross inequality has eroded the country’s potential for attaining equa...

Although there has been extensive research on the phenomenon of stress, there is still a lack of assessment tools, especially in the South African context, that have strong theoretical underpinnings, tapping into both internal depletion of resources and the excessive external demands from the environment in the measurement of stress. The aim of thi...

Despite the documented number of scales in international literature measuring perceived social support, none of these have been validated in the Ghanaian context. In this paper, we investigated psychometric properties of the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS) in school-going adolescents in the Northern region of Ghana. In de...

Although perceived social support has been studied in various contexts, there is still scant research on qualitative accounts of how perceptions of support for adolescents living in impoverished contexts are formed and relate to psychological well-being. We explored the dynamics and perceptions of social support among 18 purposefully selected schoo...

Mental-health research in resource-scarce contexts has focused on individuals' psychological deficits, while positive psychological experiences and overall well-being have remained largely neglected. Using a qualitative method involving individual interviews, the present study explores the subjective experiences of hope and life satisfaction as rep...

Mental-health research in resource-scarce contexts has focused on individuals’ psychological deficits, while positive psychological experiences and overall well-being have remained largely neglected. Using a qualitative method involving individual interviews, the present study explores the subjective experiences of hope and life satisfaction as rep...

Poster at the 8th European Conference on Positive Psychology

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), mental health is a state of well-being and not just the absence of diseases. With this definition, there has been a surge of mental health research, albeit still predominantly in Western countries, which is reflected in contemporary theories on positive mental health that include 'flourishing mental...

The current vested interest in psychopathology within the field of adolescent mental health has led to the paucity of information of how positive mental health can be promoted. Changing trends however, reveal an increasing emphasis by researchers (in the field of positive psychology) for an approach to adolescent mental health, which focuses on str...

Ghanaian women seeking paid work have long migrated from the north to Accra, in the south. Many work as poorly compensated porters and experience many difficulties, yet, by their own accounts, some adjust well to their new circumstances, despite their unfavorable situation. The aim of this study is to take a salutogenic perspective to illuminate th...