Measuring Online Wellbeing: A Scoping Review of Subjective Wellbeing Measures

Abstract

With the increasing importance of the internet to our everyday lives, questions are rightly being asked about how its' use affects our wellbeing. It is important to be able to effectively measure the effects of the online context, as it allows us to assess the impact of specific online contexts on wellbeing that may not apply to offline wellbeing. This paper describes a scoping review of English language, peer-reviewed articles published in MEDLINE, EMBASE, and PsychInfo between 1st January 2015 and 31st December 2019 to identify what measures are used to assess subjective wellbeing and in particular to identify any measures used in the online context. Two hundred forty studies were identified; 160 studies were removed by abstract screening, and 17 studies were removed by full-text screening, leaving 63 included studies. Fifty-six subjective wellbeing scales were identified with 18 excluded and 38 included for further analysis. Only one study was identified researching online wellbeing, and no specific online wellbeing scale was found. Therefore, common features of the existing scales, such as the number and type of questions, are compared to offer recommendations for building an online wellbeing scale. Such a scale is recommended to be between 3 and 20 questions, using mainly 5-point Likert or Likert-like scales to measure at least positive and negative affect, and ideally life satisfaction, and to use mainly subjective evaluation. Further research is needed to establish how these findings for the offline world effectively translate into an online measure of wellbeing.

Personality Traits, Technology-Related Teaching Skills, and Coping Mechanisms as Antecedents of Teachers’ Job-Related Affective Well-Being and Burnout in Compulsory and Higher Education Online Teaching Settings

“…Although several humans–computer interaction studies underline the link between stress and individual well-being ( Garcia-Ceja et al, 2016 ), and ways that digital technologies can affect mental processes ( Passey, 2021 ), it is worth accentuating that there could be wider consequences in implementing digital technologies in the teaching settings. This might result in an interference with different indicators of well-being due to the complicated nature in the relationship between internet usage and subjective well-being ( Ong et al, 2021 ). In addition, research has indicated that cultural context plays a major role in subjective well-being ( Diener et al, 2018 ).…”

Digital Life Data in the Clinical Whitespace

“…There is a dearth of similar work looking at the relationship between social-media language and positive aspects of psychology, such as resilience, life enrichment, and well-being, although there are notable exceptions (e.g., L. Mitchell et al's, 2013, work on happiness). This dearth is due, at least in part, to the fact that although there are some scales relevant to positive psychology and well-being (e.g., Angel et al, 2020;Swarbrick, 2006), they do not have the same ubiquity and acceptance as clinical measures of dysfunction (Ong et al, 2021). Consequently, there have been fewer data sets available for training algorithms that can link signals in digital life data to positive aspects of well-being.…”

Assessing and Tracking Students’ Wellbeing Through an Automated Scoring System: School Day Wellbeing Model

“…Measuring wellbeing has been a central task for the new science of wellbeing (Diener et al 2018). Wellbeing has been assessed and indexed using objective measures (e.g., physiological data, life expectancy as for country-level wellbeing) and subjective measures (e.g., self-reported happiness, life satisfaction; for reviews, see Conceição and Bandura 2008;Ong et al 2021). Though objective measures can provide some information on wellbeing, the majority of wellbeing assessments are subjective measures as wellbeing is largely idiographic (i.e., relating to an individual's own experiences and interpretations; Rose et al 2017;VanderWeele et al 2020).…”

“…In addition, much wellbeing information is collected only once per year, limiting the assessments' ecological validity. One recent review (Ong et al 2021) indicated that only 1.7% assessments ask for the reporting of wellbeing at the momentary level. As hedonic wellbeing (e.g., positive or negative emotions) is highly sensitive to situations, wellbeing assessments with high ecological features are imperatively needed.…”