Personal spiritual values and quality of life: Evidence from Chinese college students

Values are guiding principles in our life. While some studies found spiritual values to be “healthier”, Sagiv and Schwartz (2000) showed that people holding non-spiritual values were higher on affective well-being. We examined the predictive power of these two types of values with a longitudinal dataset collected from Chinese students in Hong Kong. Structural equation modeling revealed that spiritual values (as well as family income) positively predicted quality of life a year later. Non-spiritual, self-enhancement values, did not show any association. Results suggest that developing spiritual values may promote well-being through enabling individuals to find meaning and purpose in life