CORRELATES OF LIFE SATISFACTION OF YOUNG PEOPLE IN NOVI PAZAR

This paper deals with the problem of the relationship between young people's life satisfaction and their material condition, locus of control, attitude towards studying, attitude towards work and life orientation. The concept of life satisfaction and other correlates mentioned in the paper are certainly current in psychology and have been increasingly researched lately. It is very important to investigate the life satisfaction of young people and other correlates that contribute to life satisfaction, and to observe them all together through the prism of positive psychology. In this paper, we investigated what kind of relationships exist between the life satisfaction of young people and their material condition, their locus of control, attitude towards studies and work, and life orientation. Appropriate measuring instruments were applied to a sample of N=260 respondents (M=1.63, SD=.482). A scale for assessing life satisfaction, a scale for testing locus of control, a scale for attitudes towards studying, a scale for attitudes towards work and a life orientation scale, as well as a questionnaire for collecting appropriate sociodemographic characteristics. The scales that were used in the research showed appropriate metric characteristics of 0.87 for life satisfaction and locus of control, 0.78 for attitude towards studying, while slightly lower values for attitude towards work were 0.48 and life orientation 0.49. .The results of the research showed that there is a statistically significant positive correlation between life satisfaction of young people and satisfactory material condition (r=0.316, p=0.00) and between life satisfaction and locus of control (r=0.208, p=0.001). However, there is no statistically significant correlation between young people's life satisfaction and attitudes towards studying (r=0.107, p=0.091). As for the life satisfaction of young people and attitude towards work, there is a negative correlation between these variables (r=-0.201, p=0.001) and there is a positive correlation between life satisfaction and life orientation (r=0.456, p=0.000).