Well-being profiles in adolescence: psychometric properties and latent profile analysis of the mental health continuum model – a methodological study

Abstract

Background: The Adolescent Mental Health Continuum Short Form (MHC-SF) is a psychometrically valid tool to evaluate the domains of subjective well-being, but there is a lack of investigations which could distinguish subgroups with distinct subjective well-being profiles based on this measurement. Therefore, after testing the competing measurement models of the MHC-SF, our main aim was to identify subjective well-being profiles in a large adolescent sample. Methods: On a representative Hungarian adolescent sample (N = 1572; 51% girl; mean age was 15.39, SD = 2.26) confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) and exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) were used to test the factor stucture of the Adolescent MHC-SF. In addition, gender invariance of the best fitting model was also tested. Latent Profile Analyses (LPA) were conducted to reveal distinct subgroups and these profiles were then compared. Results: Results support the bifactor model of MHC-SF: the general and specific well-being factors which were invariant across gender. LPA yielded four subgroups, three of them have been theoretically hypothesized in previous works (i.e. flourishing, moderate mental health, languishing), but an emotionally vulnerable subgroup also emerged. Compared to the languishing group, this new subgroup demonstrated higher scores on prosocial behaviour, but had comparable level of loneliness and internalizing symptoms. Conclusions: Our results suggest that the MHC-SF is a reliable and valid instrument for assessing overall well-being and its components. In addition, the identification of young people to be at risk for low mental health may help us to tailor mental health promotion programs to their special needs.

Monitoring Positive Mental Health in Swedish Adolescents: Psychometric Evaluation of the Mental Health Continuum – Short Form

“…Taken together, our results on factor structure are well in line with the only other study, to our knowledge, that has been published thus far and included testing of the bifactor model in adolescents [35]. The results are also in line with recent psychometric evaluations in adults that compared other factor solutions to the bifactor model [28, 31-36, 39, 40].…”

“…Overall, the results support the metric, scalar and configural invariance of the model across gender and age groups. Similar multigroup invariance of the bifactor model in adolescents was recently obtained by Reinhardt et al [35]. In addition, in a large study on young adults, the metric invariance and cross-cultural replicability of the bifactor model were supported by a multigroup confirmatory analysis of the bifactor structure between samples in 38 countries [37].…”

“…More recently, some of these limitations were addressed by studies that tested additional methods and models [28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37]. The bifactor model, for example, allows for evaluation of the relevance and reliability of subscale scores after controlling for the variance of the general factor [27].…”

“…Psychometric studies that compared the fit of the bifactor model with that of other proposed models have, in most cases, favoured the bifactor solution [28, 31-36, 39, 40], including studies using exploratory structural equation modelling techniques [31,33,35,40]. However, only one study [35] (to our knowledge) has tested the bifactor model on adolescents exclusively. Furthermore, despite its widespread use in both America and Europe, no psychometric evaluation of the MHC-SF has yet been carried out in a Swedish population.…”

Transformational and Devious Leadership and How it Predicts Stress and Workplace Wellbeing

“…One large instrument of employee well-being developed by Pradhan and Hati, (2019) is formed by four discreet factors: social well-being, psychological well-being, subjective well-being and workplace well-being. The present study made use of workplace wellbeing instrument similar to the mental health continuum developed by Corey Keyes (Keyes, 2002;Reinhardt, Horváth, Morgan, & Kökönyei, 2020) that is built upon emotional wellbeing, psychological wellbeing and social wellbeing.…”