Positive Psychology, human capital and wellbeing: Experimental Evidence from Pakistan

Students in treatment schools received a light touch positive psychology intervention based on Baranov et al. (2019b), who conducted a similar intervention with residents from informal settlements in Kenya. The intervention specifically focuses on positive experiences and traits to improve psycho-social well-being, and has been effective in various sub-clinical populations (Bolier et al., 2013; Seligman et al., 2005; Meyers et al., 2013; Cohen and Sherman, 2014).
The intervention was conducted by trained enumerators during school hours. The teachers assisted the enumerators. There were 6 enumerators and one to three teachers per 30-33 students present to assist the students through the activities. These activities were conducted during breaks within the usual school day. The intervention took approximately 1.5 hours each week in each school.
The intervention consisted of the following activities, which were conducted once a week for four weeks:
• Count Your Blessings: Participants in the treatment group are given 3-5 minutes and asked to write down 5 things they are grateful or thankful for over the past day. Participants in the control group are asked to write down anything that comes to mind.

• Confidence and Self-Esteem Building: Participants in the treatment group are given 3-4 minutes to write down about a personal experience where they felt successful or proud of themselves for accomplishing a hard task. They are then asked to spend 3-5 minutes writing about a value that is important to them. Participants in the control group are given 3-5 minutes to write about their daily routine on a typical day. They are then given 3-5 minutes to write in detail about what they ate in the last 2 days.

• Hope and Aspirations: Participants in the treatment group hear a story of a successful individual. The audio clipping is played, this has been done to ensure that there is consistency in the narration of the story. They are then given 5 minutes to think about their future and where they would like to be in a year from now and write about it in their diary. Participants in the control group are read someone’s daily routine. They are then given 5 minutes to write down whatever comes to mind.

• Stress Reduction: Participants in the treatment group have a 15-minute meditation and calming session. An audio conducting the meditation session in the local language is played with the enumerators trained to enact and lead the session and have the students follow them. The meditation session is narrated via an audio to maintain consistency across all treatment schools and reduce enumerator effects. Students are encouraged to repeat these techniques whenever they feel stressed out. The control group is a pure control and has no stress reduction session.

2019-11-20

2019-12-20

We have two primary variables of interest: (i) child psycho-social well-being, (ii) child test-scores,

(i)Child’s psycho-social well-being: questions from the Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale (Huebner, 1991) and Australian child well-being survey. This is our primary outcome of interest to assess the impact of the intervention.
(ii) Test scores: These are the test-scores/ report cards provided by the schools. We have also administered some tests of our own that measure basic English, Mathematics, Urdu and General Knowledge aptitude to compliment the test scores provided by the schools and construct measure that are consistent across the schools in our sample. All test scores will be normalised to have mean zero and variance 1 as is the convention in intervention impact assessment on test scores (see Berry et al., 2018). This another primary outcome of interest to assess how effective the intervention has been in improving human capital.

Our secondary variables of interest are as follows: (i) parental investment decision in the experimental game, (ii) parental psycho-social well-being and (iii) exposure to conflict.

(i) Parental investment decision is measured as the parent's choice in the experimental game.
(ii)Parental psycho-social well-being: measured using the K-10 well-being survey.
(iii) Questions on conflict exposure from the Life in Transition Survey.

We randomly select 15 treatment schools and 15 control schools. Within treatment schools, we randomly select 30-35 students in the age group of 10-14 years who will receive the positive psychology intervention. Treatment is assigned at the school level.

We randomly select 15 treatment schools and 15 control schools. Within treatment schools, we randomly select 30-35 students in the age group of 10-14 years who will receive the positive psychology intervention. Treatment is assigned at the school level.

Assignment to treatment for the schools was randomized by the investigators via the sampsi function in Stata. The randomization of students was done in the field based on enrolment rosters provided by the schools. The source of exogenous variation is thus the randomised treatment assigned at the school level.

Treatment was assigned at the school level.

Yes

30

1000

15 control schools (with 500 students) and 15 treatment schools (500 students).

Our power calculations are informed by Berry et al., (2019)’s classroom-based intervention, who study India’s school meal programs. We cluster our treatment at the school level, with the number of clusters equal to 30. We assume 0.80 power, alpha of 0.05 and rho of 0.1 based on Berry et al. (2019). We conduct power calculations for the effect of the positive psychology intervention on student test scores. We target 1000 students, 500 in control and 500 in treatment, across 30 schools. This sample of 1000 participants is comparable to other similar studies. For example, Baranov et al. (2019a) conducted similar treatments on a sample of 903 women across 40 communities, while Gupta and Zimmer (2018) had a sample of 315 children. With our sample of 1000 students across 30 schools, we will be able to detect at minimum a 33% increase in test scores as a result of the positive psychology intervention.