Károly Varga

IS 'MEANINGFULNESS' A GENERAL MEDIATING FACToR? The Salutogenic Revolution of Question-Setting in Health Science and occupational Psychology

According to our earlier researches – stating that on the one hand in the career competency of the examined subjects, out of the Core Job Dimensions present in the Hackman-oldham Job Char acteristic Model, only Meaningfulness (task significance) contributed significantly to inducing favourable Personal and Work outcomes, and on the other hand, among the components of the Sense of Coherence, portrayed as a health and well-being factor in Antonovsky’s Salutogenic Model, it was Meaningfulness that had a preeminent role – we asked the question: to what extent can this positive effect of Meaningfulness be further generalized? That is, regarding women in Hungary who choose a healthcare career, whether Meaningfulness felt within their job motivates them with a significant enough force to be a counter-effective factor to job abandonment (especially frequent in Hungary), to persevere despite the difficult circumstances. From a methodical point of view, we completed a quasi-case study in the circle of 158 female students taking health care courses and 79 women working in healthcare for at least five years. As control groups we used the age- and sex-standardized random samples of non-healthcare students as well as workers. Here, Meaningfulness within the Sense of Coherence proved to be the significant factor for staying in the healthcare profession. Practical conclusion of the research: during the training in healthcare courses, an emphasis has to be laid upon developing the Sense of Meaningfulness in the person, by means of establishing life-career models, personal career design, and creating the chances of a healthier lifestyle.

Health Capital in the ‘Cis-Elbanian’ vs. ‘Trans-Elbanian’ Grand Regions: Frame Disputes about Framing Ambiguities and Misframings@@@Gesundheitskapital in den Großregionen Zis-Elbe versus Trans-Elbe: Klärung des Interpretationssrahmens

The present study forms an operational variation of the task undertaken in the outlook paragraph of the authors’ earlier article to study with the help of the Sense of Coherence (SOC) as a group property, the health and general well-being of the Hungarian national community (in an international comparison). With Hungary being the only Eastern Central European (‘Trans-Elbanian’) country joining the EU-project with the title Corporate Culture and Regional Embeddednes (CURE), we Hungarians tried to help achieve this goal by making the following proposal to the researchers of the five Western-European (‘Cis-Elbanian’) countries partaking in the project: the drastically different Health Capital level of the Grand Regions situated on the two sides of the Elbe–Leitha boundary (‘centrum versus semi-periphery’) should be inserted as a control variable into the original research model of the project, which has propounded the hypothesis that the interaction between the organisational culture of the corporations oper...

Unravelling the Mystery of the Sense of Coherence@@@Die Enthüllung des Mysteriums vom Kohärenzgefühl

This study reports the validation of Antonovsky’s 29-item ‘Sense of Coherence’ (SOC) scale through health criteria with the help of a representative survey of 1,400 people. The dependent variables were the score data of self-assessment of health, vegetative lability and chronic diseases, which were combined into the index of the Ease/Dis-Ease Continuum (EDEC). SOC significantly predicts place on the EDEC scale. We also found SOC predicting, in some cases, with a strength surpassing that of health criteria, the criterion data of well-being indices (cognitive satisfaction, affective happiness). Thirdly, the attitudinal and value system contents of SOC were explored through convergent validation, finding among them responsibility-taking – an element of the entrepreneurial attitude – and the integrative Maitreyan value, the proactive Promethean value and the Christian value, which fosters mutual social support. We sketch a further research task within the topic of Sense of Coherence as a group property: an examination and a project for the development of the SOC level of the Hungarian national community. For this purpose we have validated the 6-item version of the SOC scale.