Because I’m Happy: Investigating the Effects of a Social Outreach Project on Happiness Among ESL Learners in a Malaysian Private University

Understanding what promotes happiness in students may help educators to create projects that increase it. This paper investigates the effects on happiness by engaging students in a social outreach project. The students are those enrolled into the Intensive English Programme (IEN) at Taylor’s University, a premier Malaysian private university. IEN is an immersion language course for students to improve their English language proficiency. With the emergence and increase in interest in positive psychology, a number of instruments are now available to measure subjective well-being (SWB) constructs. The Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (OHQ) includes a new 6-part Likert scale and improved psychometrics that further allows the instrument to be used by a wider audience. Twelve questionnaire items in the OHQ have a reverse Likert scale scoring system to ensure accuracy. The OHQ was administered at the outset and end of the course to measure happiness levels among the participants. For this study, participants that were involved were Malaysians and international students coming from diverse cultural backgrounds and language proficiency levels. The study was conducted for a duration of 2 months, to compare the students’ responses before and after the project. The data gathered was tabulated using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software. Additionally, interviews with their teachers were conducted to substantiate the quantitative data.