Subjective Well-Being of Tribal and Non-Tribal People in Relation to Psychological Needs

The present study investigated the relationship between psychological need constructs (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) and various dimensions of subjective well-being. The sample consisted of 200 participants (52% male; 48.5% tribal) conveniently selected from Khagrachari. The instruments used were: (1) Bangla Version (IIyas, 2001) of Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985), (2) Bangla version (Ilays, 2002) of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (Watson, Clark, and Tellegan, 1988), and (3) Bangla version (Hossain, 2013) of the Psychological Need Satisfaction Questionnaire (Deci & Ryan, 2001). The findings revealed that all the psychological need constructs were significantly correlated among themselves for both tribal and non-tribal people, with one exception that relatedness and competence were not significantly related for non-tribal people. As expected, all of the need constructs were significantly associated with positive affect, negative affect, and life satisfaction for tribal people, with two exceptions: autonomy and competence were not significantly correlated with positive affect and life satisfaction respectively. Again, findings showed that the relatedness need was significantly correlated with positive affect, negative affect, and life satisfaction for non-tribal people. And, autonomy was significantly related with life satisfaction. The group type analyses revealed that levels of the outcome measures were not different within tribal compared to non-tribal except for negative affect. Simultaneous regression analyses indicated that the three needs were differentially related to the different dimensions of subjective well-being indicators, and also suggested that relatedness may be the most important need of subjective well-being.