New Well-Being Measures: Short Scales to Assess Flourishing and Positive and Negative Feelings

• Main Authors: DIENER, Ed, WIRTZ, Derrick, TOV, William, KIM-PRIETO, Chu, CHOI, Dong-won, OISHI, Shigehiro, Biswas-DIENER, Robert
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2010
• Subjects: Subjective well-being; Well-being; Measure; Positive affect; Negative affect; Scales (or Assessment); Social Psychology
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/740; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/1739/viewcontent/New_well_being_measures_Short_scales_to_assess_flourishing_and_positive_and_negative_feelings.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Measures of well-being were created to assess psychological flourishing and feelings—positive feelings, negative feelings, and the difference between the two. The scales were evaluated in a sample of 689 college students from six locations. The Flourishing Scale is a brief 8-item summary measure of the respondent’s self-perceived success in important areas such as relationships, self-esteem, purpose, and optimism. The scale provides a single psychological well-being score. The measure has good psychometric properties, and is strongly associated with other psychological well-being scales. The Scale of Positive and Negative Experience produces a score for positive feelings (6 items), a score for negative feelings (6 items), and the two can be combined to create a balance score. This 12-item brief scale has a number of desirable features compared to earlier measures of positive and negative emotions. In particular, the scale assesses with a few items a broad range of negative and positive experiences and feelings, not just those of a certain type, and is based on the amount of time the feelings were experienced during the past 4 weeks. The scale converges well with measures of emotions and affective well-being