History of the WBPP

The Well-Being Promotion Program (WPBB) is an intervention that resulted from more than 15 years of collaborative research focused on happiness in children and adolescents. The intervention program itself was inspired by doctoral students in Dr. Shannon Suldo’s research team at the University of South Florida who were motivated to bring positive psychology interventions into schools. Dr. Suldo and her doctoral students set out to translate the available research on empirically supported interventions for adults for an adolescent population. These efforts led to the first iteration of the WBPP, and then to a pilot study and two randomized control trials demonstrating increased life satisfaction for middle school students who participated in the program (Friedrich et al., 2010; Roth et al., 2017; Suldo, Savage, & Mercer, 2014). The addition of an initial caregiver information session and monthly follow-up sessions were shown to enhance these positive outcomes. The curriculum was officially published in a Guilford Practical Intervention in the Schools series book called Promoting Student Happiness: Positive Psychology Interventions in Schools in 2016.

The next step, given the positive initial evidence, was to seek funding to engage in a larger project to evaluate the efficacy of the WBPP in middle schools. Dr. Suldo contacted Dr. Fefer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in hopes of beginning a multi-site collaboration to implement and evaluate the WBPP across middle schools in Florida and Massachusetts. Dr. Fefer completed her doctoral training in the University of South Florida School Psychology program in 2013, and served as an interventionist on the WBPP initial implementation team back in 2010. Dr. Fefer eagerly agreed to collaborate, and was enthusiastic about the ways that her research focused on family-school partnership and multi-tiered interventions would be incorporated into this grant proposal for a large-scale efficacy study of WBPP as a Tier 2 intervention. Drs. Suldo and Fefer applied for funding from the highly competitive and prestigious Institute of Education Sciences in 2016. In March 2020, we received the exciting news that this important project was selected for funding! We savored our success briefly before we were struck by the challenges of a global pandemic. Our project got started the following school-year, with a slower start due to COVID-19 related school closures/absences. We completed all Year 1 project activities as of June 2022, Year 2 of project activities as of June 2023, and we are looking forward to continuing with more schools in Year 3 (2023-2024)!