Abstract and Keywords
Studies have linked meaning in life with nearly every other way of measuring the quality and well-being of people’s lives. Despite great empirical strides in meaning in life scholarship, conceptualization on the nature or scope of this important variable seems to be exploding rather than integrating. This chapter discusses the recent convergence among theorists that experiencing the presence of meaning consists of comprehension (making sense of one’s experience), purpose (possessing highly valued goals or missions for one’s life), and significance (perceiving one’s life to be worthwhile and to have value). This chapter also focuses attention on the richness of concepts such as search for meaning, sources of meaning, and orientation to meaning. Finally, this chapter proposes a structural model that unifies these concepts for the first time, portraying how they may be related to each other.
Keywords: well-being, life scholarship, search for meaning, life domains, meaning of life
Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.
Please subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.
For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.