Validation of the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience in a South African student sample

Plessis, Graham A. du; Guse, Tharina

doi:10.1177/0081246316654328

Cited by 19 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…The overall sample mean, SD, median and interquartile range (IQR) ofthe Global PSQI, SPANE, and FS scores for the 140 CAPT students surveyed are presented in Table 3 . For the purpose of comparison, we present in Table 4 the mean and standard deviation of the SPANE-P and SPANE-N scores of n university students in seven countries: United States ( Diener et al, 2010 ), Canada ( Howell and Buro, 2015 ), Germany ( Rahm et al, 2017 ), Portugal ( Silva and Caetano, 2013 ), Japan ( Sumi, 2014 ), Singapore ( Diener et al, 2010 ), and South Africa ( du Plessis and Guse, 2016 ). The students in Singapore were from the Singapore Management University (SMU).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sleep, Well-Being and Academic Performance: A Study in a Singapore Residential College

2021

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We examined the relationship between sleep and the affective components of subjective well-being as well as psychological well-being, and between sleep and academic performance, of full-time undergraduate students in a residential college at the National University of Singapore. The aspects of sleep considered were self-reported sleep duration, sleep efficiency, frequency of sleep disturbances, daytime dysfunction, sleep latency and overall sleep quality, as measured by the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index. Academic performance was measured using self-reported cumulative average point scores, typically known as grade point average in other institutions. Psychological well-being and the affective components of subjective well-being were assessed using the Flourishing Scale and the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience, respectively. With the exception of sleep latency, our univariate analysis revealed significant associations between the abovementioned facets of sleep, and the affective components of subjective well-being. The analysis also revealed significant associations between the above sleep variables and psychological well-being, except sleep latency and frequency of sleep disturbances. Only daytime dysfunction was found to be significantly correlated with academic performance in our univariate analysis. In addition, our multivariate analysis shows that psychological well-being, affect balance and academic performance each has a direct effect on overall sleep quality. The relationship between overall sleep quality and psychological well-being is U-shaped, while that between overall sleep quality and affect balance is linear and moderated by psychological well-being. The relationship between overall sleep quality and academic performance is either U-shaped or an inverted-U, depending on the level of psychological well-being, which moderates the relationship. These nonlinear relationships indicate that individuals with the highest levels of psychological well-being are not the best sleepers (in terms of overall sleep quality), neither are the highest academic achievers necessarily the best sleepers.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sleep, Well-Being and Academic Performance: A Study in a Singapore Residential College

2021

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“…The various psychometric studies of SPANE report sample means but no confidence intervals, meaning that the best comparison possible is through means and standard deviations. Those studies have found mean SPANE-B scores above zero, but several score points lower than in our sample: 7.51 (sd=8.21) in a sample of men and 4.53 (sd=8.17) in a sample of women in Italy [6]; 6.69 (sd=6.88) in a sample of college students from five universities and colleges in USA and one university in Singapore [13]; 6.66 (sd=8.18) in large sample of more than 21 000 employees in the Chinese power industry [49]; 5.96 (sd=6.72) in a multicultural student sample at a large South African university [16]; 4.41 (sd=7.79) in a sample of full-time employees and 5.10 (sd=7.54) in a sample of university students, both in Portugal [63]; and 4.30 (sd=7.50) in a sample of Japanese college students [64].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…SPANE has been validated to converge to other similar measurement instruments, including PANAS [13]. The scale provides good psychometric properties (validity and reliability) which were empirically demonstrated in several large-scale studies [6,13,16,42,49,63,64]. The scale has been proven consistent across full-time workers and students [63].…”

Section: Scale Of Positive and Negative Experiencementioning

confidence: 96%

On the Unhappiness of Software Developers

Graziotin

Fagerholm

Wang

et al. 2017

Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering

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The happy-productive worker thesis states that happy workers are more productive. Recent research in software engineering supports the thesis, and the ideal of flourishing happiness among software developers is often expressed among industry practitioners. However, the literature suggests that a cost-effective way to foster happiness and productivity among workers could be to limit unhappiness. Psychological disorders such as job burnout and anxiety could also be reduced by limiting the negative experiences of software developers. Simultaneously, a baseline assessment of (un)happiness and knowledge about how developers experience it are missing. In this paper, we broaden the understanding of unhappiness among software developers in terms of (1) the software developer population distribution of (un)happiness, and (2) the causes of unhappiness while developing software. We conducted a large-scale quantitative and qualitative survey, incorporating a psychometrically validated instrument for measuring (un)happiness, with 2 220 developers, yielding a rich and balanced sample of 1 318 complete responses. Our results indicate that software developers are a slightly happy population, but the need for limiting the unhappiness of developers remains. We also identified 219 factors representing causes of unhappiness while developing software. Our results, which are available as open data, can act as guidelines for practitioners in management positions and developers in general for fostering happiness on the job. We suggest considering happiness in future studies of both human and technical aspects in software engineering. CCS CONCEPTS•Social and professional topics → Project and people management; •Applied computing → Psychology; •Software and its engineering → Software creation and management; Programming teams;Permission to make digital

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“…In our studies, when we had the need to quantitatively assess the happiness of developers (Graziotin, Wang & Abrahamsson, 2014;Graziotin et al, 2017), we opted for the Scale of Positive and Negative Experiences (SPANE, Diener et al (2010)). SPANE converges to other similar measurement instruments and has been psychometrically validated in several large-scale studies (Rahm, Heise & Schuldt, 2017;Diener et al, 2010;Silva & Caetano, 2013;Li, Bai & Wang, 2013;Sumi, 2014;Jovanović, 2015;Corno, Molinari & Baños, 2016;Du Plessis & Guse, 2017) including consistency across full-time workers and students (Silva & Caetano, 2013).…”

Section: Happinessmentioning

confidence: 99%

A theory on individual characteristics of successful coding challenge solvers

Wyrich

Graziotin

Wagner

2019

PeerJ Computer Science

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Background Assessing a software engineer’s ability to solve algorithmic programming tasks has been an essential part of technical interviews at some of the most successful technology companies for several years now. We do not know to what extent individual characteristics, such as personality or programming experience, predict the performance in such tasks. Decision makers’ unawareness of possible predictor variables has the potential to bias hiring decisions which can result in expensive false negatives as well as in the unintended exclusion of software engineers with actually desirable characteristics. Methods We conducted an exploratory quantitative study with 32 software engineering students to develop an empirical theory on which individual characteristics predict the performance in solving coding challenges. We developed our theory based on an established taxonomy framework by Gregor (2006). Results Our findings show that the better coding challenge solvers also have better exam grades and more programming experience. Furthermore, conscientious as well as sad software engineers performed worse in our study. We make the theory available in this paper for empirical testing. Discussion The theory raises awareness to the influence of individual characteristics on the outcome of technical interviews. Should the theory find empirical support in future studies, hiring costs could be reduced by selecting appropriate criteria for preselecting candidates for on-site interviews and potential bias in hiring decisions could be reduced by taking suitable measures.

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Validation of the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience in a South African student sample

Cited by 19 publications

References 47 publications

Sleep, Well-Being and Academic Performance: A Study in a Singapore Residential College

Sleep, Well-Being and Academic Performance: A Study in a Singapore Residential College

On the Unhappiness of Software Developers

A theory on individual characteristics of successful coding challenge solvers

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