Global mental health: an improved measure of well-being in multiple languages

Sophia Graeff-Buhl-Nielsen,Amel Benzerga,Eduardo Garcia-Garzon,Tomas Folke,Kai Ruggeri

doi:10.1186/s12955-020-01375-3

Sophia Graeff-Buhl-Nielsen, Amel Benzerga + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12955-020-01375-3

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Abstract

BackgroundAn increasing number of international organisations and national governments have committed to well-being promotion. Unfortunately, important questions regarding how to assess well-being are still unresolved, making policy implementation and evaluation difficult.MethodsThis research expanded on Huppert and So’s (Soc Indic Res. 110, 837–861 2013) multidimensional subjective well-being framework by investigating the replicability of the model in two non-European regions (South America, represented by Brazil and Colombia, and Eastern Africa, represented by Uganda), and the United Kingdom. Additionally, previous limitations of the framework were also addressed.ESS Round Six items were crucially improved in terms of temporal and response scale consistency. Bayesian approximate measurement invariance was applied on a sample of 381 young adult participants to test for consistency across countries.ResultsThe Huppert & So (Soc Indic Res. 110, 837–861 2013) model was found to fairly replicate across non-European regions, where meaningful differences in well-being patterns across regions were observed. Additionally, estimated well-being was related with other well-being measures (Five Ways): Learn and Connect were the strongest predictors of general well-being, with Take Notice and Give being associated with specific aspects of it.ConclusionsBased on this narrow sample of young adults, it appears the ten-item measure proposed by Huppert & So (Soc Indic Res. 110, 837–861 2013) is useful for assessing population mental health outside of Europe. This is only an initial attempt to assess qualities, so further testing should be done before applying at scale for identifying policy opportunities to address well-being of populations.

Highlights

An increasing number of international organisations and national governments have committed to well-being promotion
The partial approximate measurement invariance (PAMI) model successfully reproduced the factor pattern hypothesized by Huppert and So [4], including two additional cross-loadings: meaning for positive characteristics (PC) and positive emotion in positive functioning (PF; Table 2)
The proposed assessment tool has a number of benefits: (a) the items in the scale have a theoretically sound rationale for inclusion, and have been (b) critically evaluated and refined across different studies, (c) the scale itself is short, reliable and valid, (d) and has been found to be cross-culturally invariant across limited European, South American and Eastern African populations

Summary

Introduction

An increasing number of international organisations and national governments have committed to well-being promotion. A number of multidimensional scales integrating these two components have been developed, such as the “Satisfaction with Life Scale” [5], Lyubomirsky and Lepper’s “Subjective Happiness Scale” [6], the “Flourishing Scale” [7], the PANAS scale [8], and the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire [9]. Such multidimensional approaches to the measurement of well-being are increasingly favoured because they offer a more holistic assessments of an individual’s experience, as well as a robust framework upon which improvements can be made. Cross-cultural validation is a important consideration since the integrity of international comparisons will rely on the premise that the same construct is being adequately captured across diverse populations [5, 10]

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