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Development of the short version of the Scales of General Well-Being: The 14-item SGWB

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Highlights

  • The 14-item version of the Scales of General Well-Being (SGWB) is introduced.

  • Evidence of good dimensionality, reliability and validity is presented.

  • The 14-item SGWB offers a brief and comprehensive assessment of well-being.

Abstract

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 0.96 and each item in the short-form 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.

Introduction

The importance of well-being has been widely acknowledged over the past twenty years. Over that time, several new psychometric tools have been developed to assess well-being. Linton, Dieppe, and Medina-Lara (2016) carried out a systematic review to identify well-being assessments designed since 1993 for general use, with English-speaking adults. Their review of 99 instruments revealed the complexity of the field, how instruments reflect different theoretical backgrounds, and a lack of clarity surrounding the similarities and differences across the range of tools.

Subsequently, Longo, Coyne, and Joseph (2017) examined similarities and differences in the six most widely used conceptions of well-being (i.e., Diener et al., 2010, Huppert and So, 2013, Keyes, 2002, Ryan et al., 2008, Seligman, 2011, Waterman et al., 2010), each of which offers a multidimensional architecture of well-being. They identified fourteen distinct and recurring constructs in the literature – happiness, vitality, calmness, optimism, involvement, self-awareness, self-acceptance, self-worth, competence, development, purpose, significance, congruence, and connection. As no existing tools assessed all fourteen constructs, each offering only a partial assessment, these were used by Longo et al. (2017) as the framework for a new multidimensional tool: the Scales of General Well-Being (SGWB).

Psychometric development of the SGWB followed four steps: Item development based on existing measures, to assess 14 constructs; content validation from a panel of six experts in well-being; refined item selection and factor analysis on 507 respondents, suggesting that well-being can be conceptualized hierarchically with fourteen lower order factors and a single general factor; testing of dimensionality, invariance across age and gender, longitudinal invariance, test-retest reliability, and criterion validation was carried out with a sample of 989 respondents.

The SGWB is an advance in the well-being literature as it is comprehensive in scope, practical as it offers researchers the ability to assess any of the fourteen scales individually, or an overall score for general well-being. However, at 65 items, it is lengthy. Researchers who want to assess only general well-being will seek a shorter tool. The aim is to develop a short 14-item version of general well-being; by selecting the item from each of the fourteen scales with the best psychometric properties, then testing the one factor scoring structure, its internal consistency, and correlations with the long form. There are already various short measures of well-being available but, as shown by Linton et al. (2016), these tend to be limited to the assessment of only one construct, or are poorly defined theoretically, such that their content as general measures is restricted or it is not clear what constructs are being assessed. As such, there remains a need for a short, robust, and reliable measure for the rapid assessment of well-being that overcomes these limitations. Therefore, in the present paper, we present the development and initial validation of a short 14-item version of the SGWB.

Section snippets

Participants and procedure

Preliminary analyses to select items from the long form of the SGWB were carried out using data from Studies 2 and 3 in Longo et al.'s (2017) paper. A brief summary of these studies is provided below.

Data from both studies 2 and 3 were collected from U.S. residents using Amazon Mechanical Turk. A small monetary incentive was given to encourage participation (approx. $0.50 to $0.77). In both studies, only individuals whose previous work had been rated as adequate 95% of the time were able to

Results

As mentioned above, preliminary factor analyses were conducted by selecting items from the long form of the SGWB, using data from studies 2 and 3 in Longo et al.'s (2017) paper.

Discussion

This study reported on the selection of fourteen items from the SGWB, and the initial validation of a short 14-item tool with which to assess general well-being. Results support the one factor scoring procedure, internal consistency reliability, and the association with the longer version is strong, suggesting the new tool is a reliable and valid measure of well-being. For researchers and clinicians who wish to assess the individual scales of well-being the longer version is recommended but for

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This research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council grant ES/J500100/1 to Ylenio Longo.

1

Division of Psychiatry and Applied Psychology, University of Nottingham.

2

School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University.

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