Abstract
Early school-based mental health screeners were informed by a deficit paradigm that aimed to identify psychological distress symptoms. In comparison, following a whole-child perspective, a dual-factor approach has been proposed that assesses complete mental health using both positive dispositions and distress symptoms. Applying the dual-factor approach, the current study involved 118 students from 10th grade and examined how strongly subjective well-being (SWB) was associated with measures of positive psychological dispositions (Social Emotional Health Survey [SEHS]) and psychological distress (Behavioral and Emotional Screening System [BESS]). Results indicated that the strength-based SEHS explained 32% of the variance in the students’ global SWB with the deficit-based BESS adding an additional 8% of explained variance. Implications for school-based mental health screening are discussed.
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