Ahmad Fadil

Happiness is a fundamental goal for every individual, including students from single-parent families who face unique psychological and social challenges. However, previous research in Indonesia has predominantly focused on the negative impacts of non-intact family structures, with limited exploration of the subjective meaning of happiness among students from single-parent families. Addressing this gap, the present study explores the meaning of happiness among junior high school students raised in single-parent families in Indonesia through a qualitative phenomenological approach. Data were collected via semi-structured interviews with two purposively selected students from MTs Ma’arif Klaten. Thematic analysis identified that student happiness is shaped by both internal factors—such as coping strategies, personal resilience, and self-acceptance—and external factors, including emotional support from family (despite its non-intact structure), positive social relationships with peers and teachers, and a supportive school environment. These findings highlight that happiness for single-parent students is a dynamic process arising from the interplay between individual psychological resources and social support, rather than being determined solely by family intactness. The study recommends that schools, teachers, and counselors strengthen social support systems and develop inclusive, responsive psychosocial interventions to enhance the psychological well-being and optimal development of students from diverse family backgrounds.

A sense of school belonging that tends to be low has an impact on problematic behavior at school, so effective psychological intervention is needed. One form of intervention carried out is gratitude intervention. This study aims to determine the effectiveness of gratitude interventions in increasing the sense of school belonging of high school students. This study uses a quantitative approach with the type of experimental research, and the design used is a pre-experimental one group pretest-posttest design. The research was conducted on students of SMA Negeri 5 Soppeng with 34 students. The determination of research participants was using the purposive sampling technique. Data were obtained by filling out the Psychological Sense of School Membership (PSSM) scale before and after the gratitude intervention. The validity of the PSSM scale was calculated using the Aiken's V test and obtained a coefficient of 0.88, while the reliability test used Cronbach's Alfa, with a reliability coefficient value of 0.86. The data analysis technique uses the N-Gain score test. The results showed that the average score of sense of school belonging before the intervention was 40.15, while after the intervention it increased to 73.5, the results of the hypothesis test using the difference index (N Gain Score) recorded an increase of 55.9. Thus, the hypothesis in this study is accepted, which means that gratitude interventions in schools are quite effective in increasing the sense of school belonging of high school students.