The satisfaction and frustration of the psychological needs for autonomy, relatedness and competence predict well-being and ill-being outcomes. However, research within educational and work contexts is stifled by the lack of an exhaustively validated measure. Following extensive preparatory and pilot work, the present three studies (total N = 762) aimed to develop such a measure and validate it against the Basic Need Satisfaction at Work Scale (Deci et al. in Personal Soc Psychol Bull 27(8):930-942, 2001) and an adapted version of the Balanced Measure of Psychological Needs (Sheldon and Hilpert in Motivation Emot 36(4):439-451, 2012). The Need Satisfaction and Frustration Scale demonstrated a better factor structure and internal reliability than its predecessors, and good criterion validity. This improvement was due to the exclusion of ambiguous items and items measuring antecedents of need satisfaction and frustration. The results also strengthen current evidence showing that need satisfaction and frustration are distinct but related constructs, and each better predicts well-being and psychological health problems, respectively.The portions of this article served as Ylenio Longo master's dissertation.
The Mental Health Continuum-Short Form (MHC-SF) is a widely used scale aimed at assessing three components of well-being: emotional, social, and psychological. The factor structure of the MHC-SF has been under debate over the past 10 years. The main goal of the present study was to examine the dimensionality of the MHC-SF. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA), bifactor CFA, exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM), and bifactor ESEM were used to evaluate competing models of the MHC-SF structure. The total sample consisted of 7,521 participants from four countries: The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, and Serbia. The results indicated that the three CFA factors were very highly related, and that a bifactor ESEM model provided the best fit to the data in all samples. Our findings provided support for the bifactor structure of well-being with a strong general factor explaining most of the variance in the items.
This paper presents the development and validation of a new well-being questionnaire: the Scales of General Well-Being (SGWB). A review of current measures identified fourteen common constructs as lower-order indicators of well-being: happiness, vitality, calmness, optimism, involvement, self-awareness, self-acceptance, self-worth, competence, development, purpose, significance, self-congruence and connection. Three studies were then conducted. In study 1, the item pool was developed and the adequacy of its content to assess each of the fourteen constructs was evaluated by consulting a panel of six subject expert academics. In study 2, the dimensionality was assessed in an adult North American sample (N = 560). The results supported the hierarchical factor structure. In study 3, further evidence confirmed the factor structure, and provided support for the measure's internal and test-retest reliability, measurement invariance across gender, age and a longitudinal period of 5 weeks, and criterion validity in an adult North American sample (N = 1,101). The SGWB promises to be a useful research tool that provides both a global measure of well-being as well as a collection of fourteen individual health-related scales.
Abstract. Well-being is typically defined as positive feeling (e.g. happiness), positive functioning (e.g. competence, meaning) or a combination of the two. Recent evidence indicates that well-being indicators belonging to different categories can be explained by single "general" factor of well-being (e.g. Jovanovic, 2015). We further test this hypothesis using a recent well-being scale, which includes indicators of positive feeling and positive functioning (Huppert & So, 2013). While the authors of the scale originally identified a two-factor structure, in view of recent evidence, we hypothesize that the two-factor solution may be due to a method effect of different items being measured with different rating scales. In study 1, we use data from the European Social Survey round 3 (n = 41,461) and find that two factors have poor discriminant validity and, after using a bifactor model to account for different rating scales, only the general factor is reliable. In study 2, we eliminate method effects by using the same rating scale across items, recruit a new sample (n = 507), and find that a onefactor model fits the data well. The results support the hypothesis that well-being indicators, typically categorized as "positive feeling" and "positive functioning," reflect a single general factor.
The Scales of General Well-Being (SGWB, Longo, Coyne & Joseph, 2017) is a 65-item tool assessing fourteen different constructs. The aim of this study was to develop a short 14-item version. One item was chosen from each of the fourteen scales following inspection of previously-published factor loadings and content validity ratings. In total, 446 responses from U.S residents were collected from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Results supported a factor structure consistent with the long form, as well as good internal consistency. Additionally, general well-being scores of short-and long-form correlated at .96 and each item in the shortform was strongly related to its respective long-form scale. The 14-item SGWB offers a brief assessment of well-being based on a novel and comprehensive operational definition, and promises to be of practical use to researchers and clinicians.
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