**4. Research on life satisfaction of college students**

Life satisfaction is an important factor for a healthy life. In the context of Korea, the satisfaction of college students1 after completing severe entrance examinations is important for healthy college life, academic achievement, and successful career development. The construct of "satisfaction with life" represents the cognitive component of subjective well-being [30]. Pavot and Diener [30] defined life satisfaction as "a judgment process in which an individual evaluates his or her quality of life based on his or her own criteria." Hence, evaluation of life satisfaction is based on a cognitive appraisal of the overall quality of a person's life, based on self-selected standards [31].

Studies report that demographic variables (e.g., gender and socioeconomic status) appear to play a very modest role in relation to life satisfaction in adolescents [32]. Studies that have found gender differences generally report that boys score higher on life satisfaction than girls [33]. Life satisfaction is a central construct in relation to other emotional, social, and behavioral constructs [32]. There is a moderate effect of socioeconomic status, including income and educational level, on life satisfaction [34, 35].

Among the factors influencing life satisfaction, there are self-concept and selfesteem, especially for adolescents and early adult college students. According to Dubois and Tevendale [34], self-esteem is a psychological vaccine that can protect against all kinds of developmental problems [34]. Indeed, many studies on selfesteem have shown that it significantly affects life satisfaction and mental health [35]. The self-concept is an individual's view of oneself and is called self-esteem. In other words, self-esteem is an individual's judgment of how valuable "I am." One of the self-concepts is a sense of self-identity in which one realizes who they are, and it has been reported that those whose self-identity is not established have a higher score for depression [36]. The relationship between self-esteem and depression has been extensively studied in health research over the past decade [37, 38]. Self-esteem, depression, and self-identity are closely related to each other.

Depression is another critical issue in the lives of college students. Depressed college students feel low self-worth and negatively evaluate themselves, which damages their self-esteem. Depression refers to a state of mind that has a negative impact on the overall daily life from thinking, attitude, perception, and cognition to interpersonal relationships. Depression is accompanied by various psychological problems, and painful emotional reactions, such as frustration, guilt, worthlessness, loneliness, and hopelessness, leading to negative and pessimistic thoughts, and furthermore to

<sup>1</sup> This section is based on Jun & Jung [29].

self-deprecation and suicidal thoughts, where they consider themselves incompetent, inferior, and worthless [39]. Depression experienced by college students varies from mild depression to severe psychotic conditions that interfere with their daily lives [37–39].

Low socioeconomic status (SES) has been found to be associated with a higher prevalence of depression. According to a meta-analysis conducted by Lorant et al., a low socioeconomic status was found to be related to the prevalence of depression [40]. In a study on the association between depression and socioeconomic status in Korea, Cho et al. reported a result from a nationwide sample analysis that was like those of the previous studies in foreign countries [41]. Kang and Ji [42] categorized self-efficacy, hope, optimism, and resilience as positive psychological capital, and all were found to be factors affecting depression. Among the four factors of positive psychological capital, self-efficacy was found to be the most influential factor. From these results, the lower the self-efficacy, hope, optimism, and resilience, the higher the perception of depression among college students.

It is necessary to pay attention to the positive psychological state of trying to solve the current difficulties and look at the future with a positive perspective. Positive psychological factors refer to a positive psychological state of an individual to perform well in each task and achieve successful results [43]. It is not innate but can be changed with effort, so it is a psychological factor that changes an individual's attitude and affects behavioral results [43]. Therefore, if a positive psychological state is maintained, we can be mentally and physically healthy and achieve the expected performance in the work given to us [44]. On the other hand, there is a need to decrease the negative psychological state.

Jun and Jung [29] identify the factors affecting life satisfaction of Korean college students, using the data from the Korea Children's Youth Panel Survey (KCYPS) conducted by the Korea Youth Policy Institute. The KCYPS was conducted in 2010 to identify the growth and developmental patterns of children and adolescents. A total of 7071 samples from 16 provinces including first-year students, fourth-grade students, and first-year students at middle school were selected using multi-level cluster sampling method. In this study, there were first-year college students in 2016 who were first-year middle school students in 2010. Among the 2351 samples extracted, the last 1220 questionnaires were used for the final analysis, excluding the missing questionnaires in the questionnaire response related to this study.

The demographic characteristics of the survey subjects are 575 (47.1%) male and 645 (52.9%) female students. Looking at the family's economic level as reported by the college students themselves, 233 (19.1%) have good living, 781 (64.0%) were average, and 206 (16.9%) answered not good enough. Stepwise multiple regression analysis was conducted to analyze the effects of positive and negative psychological variables on life satisfaction. There are four factors (self-esteem, ego-resilience, self-identity, and life satisfaction) in the category of positive domain and four factors (attention deficit, aggression, depression, and social withdrawal) in the negative domain.

First, the level of explanations of self-esteem, attention deficit, and depression was 46.5% (r2 = 0.465), and this regression model was statistically significant (F = 353.866, p < 0.001). To grasp the relative influence, the standardization coefficients were found to be depression (−0.338), self-esteem (0.302), and selfresilience (0.174). The higher the level of self-esteem and self-resilience, and the lower the degree of depression, the more influence on life satisfaction. Tolerance and VIF statistics were checked to identify multicollinearity problems. As a result,


**Table 2.**

*Factors affecting the increase of life satisfaction of college students by multiple regression analysis.*

the tolerance value was less than 1.0, the VIF value was less than 10, and the Durbin-Watson value was 1.912, which was close to 2 so it did not have the problem of multicollinearity (**Table 2**).

The life satisfaction of college students was negatively related to depression, and depression was closely related to aggression. To increase life satisfaction, depression is reduced. At this time, as a program to reduce depression, self-esteem or self-resilience can be increased. Rosenberg [45] defined self-esteem as an individual's set of thoughts and feelings about his or her own worth and importance. This definition reflects the notion of "global" or "general" self-esteem or self-worth. Self-esteem is a large part of college students' self-understanding and is likely to be a fluctuating and dynamic construct, susceptible to internal and external influences during early adulthood. According to Pavot and Diener [30], both self-esteem and life satisfaction indicate one's global evaluations. As in previous studies, when this study found out that selfesteem is the factor that mostly affects the life satisfaction of university students, in the future, universities will be able to develop and proceed with programs to increase students' self-esteem.

Student's college period is an intermediate stage of transition from childhood to adulthood, and various experiences are made according to the developmental changes. In addition, it is known that internalizing problems, such as depression, anxiety, and social withdrawal, and externalizing problems, such as aggression and delinquency, occur when the developmental task is not successfully performed during the development process [46]. In other words, it is predicted that the internalizing problem behavior of social withdrawal in college students directly affects the externalizing problem behavior of aggression and lowers life satisfaction [47].

### **5. Conclusion**

How will the youth living in Korea be expressed? Most people fully project the positive image of the word youth. It is thought that young people should be full of challenges and passion, and the young people themselves are familiar with words, such as passion, ambition, will, and youth. However, the way young Koreans are living is very different from the positive image we have in mind. Negative words, such as "loser," "work-worm," "consumables," "sigh," and "in the same place" were suggested [10].

Korean university students are currently going through difficult times due to low employment rates amid many social turbulences. Most of them prepare for

employment during 4 years of college, and they have a lot of preparation period after graduation. To improve the employment rate of university students, the government reorganizes the university curriculum and policy to foster departments with good employment opportunities.

Research on happiness was hardly studied before 2000, and it started to increase rapidly around 2000. This trend can be said to reflect the social reality around 2000 when Koreans were interested in well-being and focused on efforts and methods to be happy. However, as studies on happiness are still focused onto confirming relationships of variables, there is a limit to the role of research on happiness in helping people more accurately understand happiness and promoting happiness. To make happiness a reality for people and help people live a happy life, the study of happiness suggests, based on the existing research results, what factors should be interested in to become happy and how best to work to promote those factors [12].

Young people living in the twenty-first century want to make a living doing what they love. Nearly 30% of young people answered that they have a successful life when they are doing what they love, that is, self-actualization and self-fulfillment. A happy and harmonious family (27.2%) ranked second, and economic success (22.9%) ranked third. We hope that our country will become a country where college students and young people become happy.
