The Relationship Between Meaning in Life and Subjective Well-Being: Forgiveness and Hope as Mediators

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether hope and forgiveness are mediators in the relationship between meaning in life and subjective well-being. The sample consisted of 482 university students. The Meaning in Life Questionnaire, the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience, the Satisfaction with Life Scale, the State Hope Scale, the Dispositional Hope Scale, the Heartland Forgiveness Scale, and the demographic information form were used for data collection. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data. Fitness of the hypothesized model was tested through some model specifications. The results of the study indicated that hope and forgiveness fully mediated the relationship between meaning in life and subjective well-being. The findings of the study have contributed to the efforts to understand factors associated with subjective well-being of university students. These findings were discussed in the light of related literature and implications were suggested for university counseling services and future research.