Developing a Social Evolutionary Measure of Child and Adolescent Hedonic and Eudaimonic Wellbeing in Rural Sierra Leone

Abstract

The study establishes the validity of a new measure of child and adolescent hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing designed for international use and based on social evolutionary theory. The measure advances the fields of psychometrics and happiness studies by providing the first a-contextual assessment of both hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing that is suitable for use with children and adolescents. The Child and Adolescent Personal and Social Assessment of Wellbeing contains a brief measure (8-items) of children’s global hedonia and eudaimonia, and domain specific measures (8-items each) of children’s wellbeing in relation to peers, teachers, and families. To develop the measure, we conducted a mixed methods investigation in rural Sierra Leone. We researched the ecological validity of the conceptual framework in a qualitative study of 40 participants (19 children and 21 adults) living in two communities. We developed the quantitative items through a two-phase pilot study of 200 children living in ten communities. We examined the psychometric properties of the measure in the pilot study data, and in a larger dataset generated with 2324 children living in 95 communities. The qualitative results showed that the participants experienced the framework components (e.g., social acceptance) in their daily lives, and that each component was intertwined with indigenous perspectives on child wellbeing. The quantitative results demonstrated that the measure had good dimensional, concurrent, and predictive validity.