The relationship between students studying habits, joyfulness and depression

BACKGROUND: One of the important requirements for cultural, social and even economic development is having a bookloving nation. In order to have such a nation, there is a need for purposeful and dynamic programming. The purpose of this research was to determine the relationship between students studying habits, joyfulness and depression in Isfahan University of Medical Science.METHODS: This research was a descriptive and correlative study. The population studied included all MSc and PhD students in the second semester of the Isfahan University of Medical Science (263 students). In this research, 100 students were selected using stratified random sampling method. Data collection instruments were Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Oxford Happiness Inventory and a researcher-made questionnaire to determine the amount of students studying. Validity of this questionnaire was determined by structure and content related validity and its reliability was calculated by Cronbach s alpha coefficient for the first (r = 0.94), second (r = 0.91) and third (r = 0.85) questionnaire used in this research. Analysis of research findings was done through descriptive and inferential statistics. RESULTS: Findings showed that 68.8 percent of students study less than 5 hours while only 2.5 percent of students study more than 10 hours. Sixty five percent of students were highly while 35 percent were moderately joyful. In 60 percent of the students, there was no symptom of depression while 7.5 had these symptoms. Also, there was no significant relationship between joyfulness and studying but there was a significant and invert relationship between studying and depression, and joyfulness and depression. CONCLUSIONS: The amount of studying and tendency for reading are among the most important indices of human growth in terms of potential abilities to achieve a perfect human life and to prevent uni-dimensional thinking. Thus, finding a ways to encourage students to study is considered essential to make a healthy and developed society.