New Measures of Well-Being

We present new measures of well-being to assess the following concepts: 1. Psychological Well-Being (PWB); 2. Positive Feelings, Negative Feelings, and the balance between the two (SPANE-P, N, B); and 3. Positive Thinking. The PWB scale is a short 8-item summary survey of the person’s self-perceived functioning in important areas such as relationships, self-esteem, purpose and meaning, and optimism. The scale is substantially correlated with other psychological well-being scales, but is briefer. The scale provides a single overall psychological well-being score and does not yield scores for various components of well-being. The Scale of Positive and Negative Experience (SPANE) yields a score for positive experience and feelings (6 items), a score for negative experience and feelings (6 items), and the two can be combined to create an experience balance score. This 12-item brief scale has a number of desirable features compared to earlier measures of positive and negative feelings. 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 frequency of feelings during the past month. A scale to measure Positive Thinking is also presented. Basic psychometric statistics are presented for the scales based on 573 college students at five universities. New Measures of Well-Being When examining the standard scales for assessing well-being, we were impressed with the need for measurement scales in several domains—positive and negative feelings, positive thinking, and a brief scale of psychological well-being (PWB). E. Diener (B) Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820, USA e-mail: [email protected] The scale in this article entitled Psychological Well-Being has since been renamed as the Flourishing Scale. Further psychometrics and other data concerning the scale can be found in the article: Diener, E., Wirtz, D., Tov, W., Kim-Prieto, C., Choi, D., Oishi, S., & Biswas-Diener, R. (2009). New measures of well-being: Flourishing and Positive and Negative Feelings. E. Diener (ed.), Assessing Well-Being: The Collected Works of Ed Diener, Social Indicators Research Series 39, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-2354-4 12, C © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 247 248 E. Diener et al. These concepts are related to one another and to life satisfaction, although the types of well-being are separable (Lucas, Diener, & Suh, 1996; Ryff, 1989) and must, therefore, be assessed separately. Although scales exist to measure several of these constructs, the instruments have limitations that make additional measures desirable. We present a short measure of psychological well-being (PWB) designed to complement the longer scales that are available and a measure of negative and positive feelings that is designed to better assess ongoing feelings of well-being. An initial scale to assess positive thinking contains both positive and negative items. We present the psychometric properties of the scales, such as reliabilities and convergent correlations with other relevant measures. The scales in this chapter are similar to measures that were first presented in Diener and Biswas-Diener’s Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth (2008). Several items were altered or dropped, and we report here psychometric analyses that examined features of the revised scales such as internal and temporal reliability, factor structure, discriminant validity of the scales from one another, and convergent validity with other similar scales. The measures in this chapter, and their shortened names, are: Positive Experience (SPANE-P) Negative Experience (SPANE-N) The Balance of Positive and Negative Experience (SPANE-B) Positive Thinking (PTS) Psychological Well-being (PWB)