Analysing the Comparability of 3 Multi-Item Subjective Well-Being Psychometric Scales Among 15 Countries Using Samples of 10 and 12-Year-Olds

Abstract

To date, most cross-country comparisons of children's subjective well-being have been conducted using single-item scales. Despite multi-item scales being more powerful for this purpose, they have seldom been tested on children when comparing results among more than 4 countries. Moreover, with very few exceptions, international comparisons have mostly been carried out using samples of children aged 12 or over and it is therefore uncertain how the scales available might work among younger populations, even if some scales have been tested in a few countries. We tested 3 psychometric scales on a sample of over 34,000 children from 15 countries aged mostly 10 and 12: the SLSS, the BMSLSS and the PWI-SC. We used the pooled database to identify models with a good fit by means of Confirmatory Factor Analysis, providing construct validity for each of the three scales for this set of countries. The comparability of the scales among countries was tested using Multi-group Confirmatory Factor Analysis to assess to what extent it is valid to make cross-national comparisons. Our results suggest that it is acceptable to compare correlations and regressions between most of the countries in our survey using each of these measures, with only a few exceptions. Some of the models using the specific modified SLSS version adopted in this research displayed promising results due to the fact that their correlations and regressions appeared to be comparable among all countries in the sample. However, mean scores for the overall indexes are only comparable among countries in some cases using partial intercept constraints. Two Multi-group Structural Equation Models including the three correlated multi-item psychometric scales plus two single-item scales (Overall Life Satisfaction and Overall Happiness Scale) displayed good fit indexes with constrained loadings for all countries, both for the 10 and 12-year-old samples. This result suggests that subjective well-being comparability increases among countries Child Ind Res when using the five psychometric scales all together. With semi-partial constrained loadings and intercepts, fit statistics suggest that the means of this overall model can cautiously be compared among all countries: comparable items and not strictly comparable items were identified. Correlations among the psychometric scales and regressions of the multiple-item scales on the single-item scales clearly show different patterns among countries and variations according to age group, suggesting a high diversity of interrelations among these measures depending on age and different language and socio-cultural contexts.

Subjective Well‐Being Decreasing With Age: New Research on Children Over 8

“…In general, the context‐free scales seem to report significant changes in more countries than the domain‐based scales. This result could be related to the fact that multi‐item context‐free scales display better cross‐cultural comparability than domain‐based scales (Casas, ) and is worth exploring in more detail in future research.…”

The Association of Childhood Factors with Children’s Subjective Well-Being and Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties at 11 years old

“…It also does not acknowledge the considerable empirical work that has now been done to test and validate measures of children's self-reported well-being over the last few decades (e.g. Huebner 1991;Casas 2016). As concluded in a recent UNICEF Report Card 'Subjective well-being measures record something real and important about children's lives' (UNICEF 2013. p.43).…”

Introduction to the Special Section on Children's Subjective Well‐Being

“…With the Children's Worlds data sets it was possible to take a broader approach because the questionnaires included a number of different sets of items (Casas, ). Cases were only excluded from the international data set if systematic extreme answers were also found for the set of time use questions and additional depurations could be made for each scale depending on the specific data exploitation.…”

“…In the second wave, a representative sample for the entire country was obtained in Estonia, Ethiopia, Israel, Nepal, Norway, Romania, and South Korea, whereas a representative regional sample was obtained in Algeria (El Bayedh, Tlemcen, and Oran), Colombia (Antioquia), Germany (Thuringia, Hesse, Baden‐Wurttemberg, and North Rhine‐Westphalia), Poland (Wielkopolska), South Africa (Western Cape), Spain (Catalonia), and Turkey (Istanbul), and representative data from England were collected as a part of the United Kingdom (Casas, ). As data collection was based on class‐groups at school, the mean age of each age group was slightly above the selected age, although not all countries display exactly the same age distribution, as may be expected (Casas, ).…”

“…The ISCWeB questionnaires include the items from modified versions of the SLSS (Huebner, 1991), BMSLSS (Seligson et al, 2003), and PWI-SC (Cummins & Lau, 2005) scales, as well as the two single-item scales on overall life satisfaction (OLS; Casas, 2011) and overall happiness during the last 2 weeks (Casas, 2017). While all scales used 0-10 scores in the 10-and 12-year-old questionnaires, five graded emoticons were used in the 8-year-old questionnaire.…”