Relationship of Absentee OFW Parents to the Subjective Well-being of Adolescent Students of DRANHS
“Happiness is a gift one cannot imagine” (Pieper, 1958). How happy are most people? How can you tell if you’re happy or not? Who makes happiness happen? Every man deserves to be happy but it is not easily found.
With the unstable economic situation and the high unemployment rate in the Philippines, there are a lot of Filipinos who are suffering from financial crisis. We cannot deny the fact that there are many Filipinos who are going abroad to be an Overseas Filipino Worker to support and provide for their families. We all know that Filipinos want to share every moment with their family but because of their work abroad, they need to sacrifice for their better future. Most children of OFW’s grow up without one of their parents. The relationship between the parents and the children does not develop due to the absence of the parents and it can be very crucial if the children of these OFW’s are in their adolescent years (Santrock, 2008). Living with an adolescent has been likened to riding an emotional roller coaster. Even before the earliest signs of puberty appear, children experience emotional shifts as their internal chemistry starts to change. A puberty progresses, they get moody and emotional. For both sexes, the teenage or adolescent years are a time of extreme sensitivity. (Rowe,L.,Bennet, D.,Tonge,B.2004). And what can parents do about this? According to Rowe,L. Et. .al (2004) parents can pay attention to their children. If a parent can stand by and listen without becoming uptight the situation can remain manageable. How can a parent pay enough attention to their adolescent children if they are not physically present? Because of this, the researchers want to know if the children of these OFW’s are still happy when their parents are not around and what makes this children stay happy?
What is happiness? In the article Pursuit of Happiness (2005),the concept of happiness has a culturally and philosophically diverse history, meaning that there is unlikely to be a single definition that applies at all people at all times. If this is so, the very idea of being able to research happiness from a scientific point of view seems very suspect. Diener contends that in general, people are happy if they think they are happy or at least, each person is the best judge of whether they are in fact happy or not. If so, then there is no absolute definition of happiness and Deiner labels happiness as “Subjective well being” (Pursuit of Happiness, 2005).Subjective well being or SWB is defined as a person’s cognitive and affective evaluation of his or her life (Lucas and Oshi, 2002). According to the Encyclopedia of positive psychology (2013), subjective well being is comprised of three components: a.) frequent positive affect b.) Infrequent negative effect and c.)High life satisfaction. Though related, these 3 components appear to be independent.
Among the main obstacle that held back research on happiness was how to measure it. As stated by Compton, W. And Hoffman, E. (2013), the solution in subjective well being research was to use a straightforward approach allowing participants themselves to define terms of happiness. In this way, the true judge of how happy someone was would be “whoever lives inside a person’s skin” (Myers and Diener, 1995 as cited in Compton and Hoffman, 2013).
In this study, the researchers would like to know the relationship of the absentee parents on the subjective well being of their adolescent child. How can an adolescent remain happy even though their parents are not physically present? Or are they really happy?
Conceptual Framework
Independent Variable Dependent Variable

The researchers will use a 2x2 factorial design where we aim to know the relationship of the absentee OFW parents on the Subjective well being of an adolescent. The independent variable are the parents (present and