Study type: Daily diary (experience-sampling) study with pre–post assessment and person-specific time-series models.
In plain language
Research that averages across people consistently finds that using your character strengths, such as curiosity, kindness, or perseverance, goes along with feeling better. But does that average pattern hold for each individual? Barkat Ali and colleagues tested this “ergodic” assumption with 235 undergraduates in Karachi, Pakistan, who rated their daily use of 24 character strengths and their well-being for up to 21 days (17 days on average), and completed the same questionnaires before and after the diary period.
The researchers fitted a separate time-series model (i-ARIMAX) for every student, then meta-analysed those person-specific results. On average, strength use went with more energy, vitality, meaning, and life satisfaction, and only slightly with less distress. Underneath those averages, though, the links differed greatly between students in size and sometimes in direction. For some students, a given strength, such as expressing love, went with more anxiety on the same days it went with more meaning.
Simply tracking strengths each day may also have acted as a light-touch intervention. As a group, students used several strengths more over the three weeks and reported less sadness, anxiety, and stress at the end. Again, this was not true for everyone: a subgroup of “responders” showed large drops in distress, while most students showed little change.
Key points
- Small average benefits. Median pooled effects of daily strength use were about β = 0.09–0.12 for positive outcomes (energy, vitality, meaning, life satisfaction, self-rated health) but only about −0.03 to −0.06 for sadness, anxiety, stress, and anger.
- Large person-to-person differences. Median heterogeneity (I²) was 65–74%. Sign-divergence (SDEN) tests showed that more students than chance would predict had effects opposite to the group average. This was the case for nearly all strengths predicting anxiety (96%) and sadness (100%).
- Distress fell for the group as a whole. From pre-test to post-test, sadness (d = −0.45), anxiety (−0.27), and stress (−0.21) decreased significantly, while positive outcomes did not change reliably.
- Responders and nonresponders. Clustering of pre–post changes (n = 197) identified 58 responders, with large reductions in sadness, anxiety, stress, and anger, and 139 nonresponders, with little change. Some nonresponders even worsened. The two groups did not differ in how much they used their strengths, or in how much that use increased.
- Daily dynamics told them apart. What distinguished responders was their person-specific daily link between strength use and distress: for them, more strength use went with less distress. This suggests that a short period of daily monitoring could help identify who is likely to benefit from a strengths-based approach.
What the paper does and does not establish
- The pre–post design had no control group, so reductions in distress cannot be attributed with confidence to strength monitoring rather than to other influences, such as the timing of the semester.
- i-ARIMAX models describe same-day associations and do not establish causality. With about 17 assessments per person, individual estimates are imprecise, and no single student’s estimate should be over-interpreted.
- Most outcomes were single-item self-reports, and the sample (partly participating for course credit) may not represent all students. The authors call for randomised and adaptive trials that use pretest diaries to match people with the approach most likely to help them.
How to cite
APA 7
Barkat Ali, S., Ciarrochi, J., Hernández, C., Mansoor, A., Hayes, S. C., Ong, C., & Sahdra, B. K. (2026). Tailoring strengths-based supports in higher education: Evidence from daily diaries and idiographic models. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 42, Article 101035. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcbs.2026.101035
BibTeX
@article{barkatali2026tailoring,
title = {Tailoring strengths-based supports in higher education: Evidence from daily diaries and idiographic models},
author = {{Barkat Ali}, Salima and Ciarrochi, Joseph and Hernández, Cristóbal and Mansoor, Aqsa and Hayes, Steven C. and Ong, Clarissa and Sahdra, Baljinder K.},
journal = {Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science},
year = {2026},
volume = {42},
pages = {101035},
doi = {10.1016/j.jcbs.2026.101035}
}
Related work
- Beyond the average: Psychological flexibility and mood
- One size fits none: A call for an idionomic revolution
- Testing idionomic statistics: ‘Doing what matters’
- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi
Summary based on the full article (Elsevier corrected proof, October 2026). The article is open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence, and the full PDF is linked from the publisher. Summary prepared from the full paper on 5 November 2026. Please cite the published article linked above.