Student-Led Kindness Intervention Boosts High School Students’ Well-being

Despite growing public concerns about high school students’ mental health, research into how kindness-based interventions affect their subjective well-being remains scant. This study addresses three research gaps in kindness-based interventions: adolescent-peer leadership throughout the experiment, administration outside laboratory or classroom settings, and applicability to boarding high school students. These gaps exist because kindness-based interventions for adolescents are a relatively new topic. Addressing these gaps may help improve the interventions' effectiveness and their costs. I hypothesized that a seven-day pay-it-forward random acts of kindness intervention would boost the subjective well-being of boarding high school students. Volunteer participants from a boarding high school were randomly assigned to an intervention group (random acts of kindness) or an active control group (tree observations). Thirty and thirty-two participants completed the study, respectively. I administered the experiment online via emails and a dedicated website. Results indicated a statistically significant enhancement in participants' happiness and a large effect size as measured by the Subjective Happiness Scale. Although improvements in gratitude and life satisfaction, as assessed by the Gratitude Questionnaire and the Satisfaction With Life Scale, respectively, were not statistically significant, their positive trends suggest that a broader impact on the school community’s subjective gratitude and life satisfaction might be achievable with a larger sample size or an extended intervention duration. This peer-led, simple, and cost-effective kindness-based intervention can be readily replicated by student leaders in day and boarding high schools on a sustainable and scalable basis, bolstering subjective well-being at both individual and school community levels.