Individual and situational factors related to the experience of flow in adolescence a multilevel approach

Abstract

A fundamental issue pursued by researchers in positive psychology involves defining what constitutes a good life and understanding how individuals can create one. From the perspective of flow theory, a good life is one that is characterized by complete absorption in what one does (Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi in Handbook of positive psychology. Oxford, New York, 2002). Born out of a desire to understand intrinsically motivated activity, flow refers to a state of optimal experience characterized by total absorption in the task at hand: a merging of action and awareness in which the individual loses track of both time and self, The flow state is experientially positive, and out of the flow experience emerges a desire to replicate the experience. Over the past three decades, Csikszentmihalyi and colleagues have developed theoretical constructs and empirical research tools to better understand the nature, origins, and consequences of this state of optimal experience called flow. In this chapter, we describe the flow model and then present data analyses in which we explore the personal traits and contextual conditions associated with the experience of flow among adolescents in the United States. We demonstrate the utility of hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) for exploring flow using a complex data set characterized by repeated measures.