In this paper we aim at investigating the concept of happiness from the adolescents' perspective. For this purpose we adapted the partially structured interview script about children's subjective well being produced by Giacomoni (2002). We studied 95 adolescents, between 12 and 20 years, students of tree public schools of the interior of the Rio Grande do Sul. The transcribing interviews were submitted to a content analysis, from which we extracted thematic categories. The categories we got from the study pointed to a trend of the adolescents in mentioning abstract feelings and concrete necessities related to happiness. The analysis of significant differences by sex pointed that girls mentioned diverse kinds of relationships related to happiness, while boys tend to correlate happiness with personal belonging and life conditions. These findings can contribute to the construction of subjective well-being assessment scales for teenagers. Moreover, they can help educator in giving orientation and making intervention when necessary.
Positive psychology; happiness; adolescents
