Children’s Subjective Well-being; Review on Definitions and Measures

Expended Abstract Introduction: Over the past decades there has been an increasing trend in research towards the children’s subjective well-being (SWB) as an important health and social policy issue. There are many scales for measuring SWB to the extent that selecting an appropriate scale among the available measures could still be regarded as a challenge. Given that measuring subjective well-being of children could be used by governments for their own purposes and improve their services, the inappropriate measures may lead to the inappropriate policies.The main goal of this study is to summarize and discuss global literature regarding the definition and measurement of children’s SWB. As a result, a substantial amount of the information has been provided s regards the definition, the structure of children’s SWB, the most commonly measures, and their proper applicationhas been discussed. Method: A systematic literature search and a narrative synthesis of publications was conducted using electronic search in databases including PubMed/Medline, Scopus, Web of Science, SID, and MAGIRAN. All databases were searched in January 2018 using the followingterms were identified from the title, abstract, keywords, ‘subjective well-being’, ‘mental well-being’, students, and children.The articles published in peer-reviewed journals and available in full-text in English or Persian were included in the study. Data synthesis was performed according to the Guidance on the Conduct of Narrative Synthesis in Systematic Reviews by Popay et al. (2006). Critical review: Researchers based on three types of theories —Mental States Theories, Desire-based Theories, and Needs-based Theories—that are capable of explaining wellbeing concepts, have operationalized and measured child well-being in different ways. The concept of subjective well-being has been operationalized as a component of children’s well-being and measured in different ways according to Mental States Theories and Desire-based Theories. Findings show SWB is defined as cognitive and affective evaluation and judgment of life that means experiencing pleasure and positive effects, low level of negative moods, and high life satisfaction. In a similar way, child SWB refers to young person’s experience of affective reactions and cognitive judgments in term of Optimism, happiness, anxiety, fears, and satisfaction. In general, well-being is defined in terms of two different psychological traditions, labeled Hedonism and Eudaimonism. Hedonic approach, defines well-being as pleasure, happiness or pain avoidance, and it is considered as subjective well-being. On the other hand, the Eudaimonic approach argues that well-being does not mean just pleasure or happiness. It relates to purpose in life, personal fulfillment, living well, and realizing human potentials. This approach focuses on psychological wellbeing. In term of operationalization, a review of the literature shows that various scales have been developed to improve measuring children’s SWB. They could be divided as global versus specific measures; single-question versus multiple-question measures. Global measures of children’s SWB are used to measure overall happiness or global perception of life satisfaction, while specific indicators measure children’s satisfaction with a particular aspect of their life. On the other groups, multi-question measurement scales are formed of several questions and usually are more reliable than a single question. Yet, single questions are useful tool for large surveys because they are easier to administer. Our findings indicated that the most common measurement tools for children’s SWB were global/domain-specific life satisfaction and happiness, peer and family relationships, and self-esteem scale. There is no a particular determinant of children’s SWB. A set of conditions including mental health, parent-child relationship, positive social relationships, and environmental issues that seem to be necessary for achieving high subjective well-being. To the best of our knowledge, there are not studies that examined the SWB of Iranian young children and the most frequently used scales in Persian researche dtudies were multi-dimensional students’ life satisfaction scale and Ryff scales in a sample population of middle school and high school students. This study shows that children’s SWB is a broad concept with a considerable complexity and debate in terms of defining and measuring. Discussion: By now governments in many countries in order to develop early childhood policy in the relevant areas are interested to provide insight into how young people experience the quality of their lives. The findings indicated that although over the past decade many efforts have been made to develop theoretical and empirical models related to the child’s subjective well-being. Yet, it seems that there is not a theory of well-being specific to children. The researchers have tried to measure children SWB while a child is defined as an immature adult. More detailed research would be required to explain the absence of a theory of child well-being. Researchers have operationalized children SWB in various ways; however, they considered that a child is doing well in the case of: “1) Developing those stage-appropriate capacities that would, for all we know, equip her for successful future, given her environment. 2. Engaging with the world in child-appropriate ways, for instance, with curiosity and exploration, spontaneity, and emotional security”.  While studying children’s SWB, researchers were faced with some challenges. A big challenge in measuring and monitoring SWB is related to children’s cognitive ability. Critics of measuring children’s wellbeing would argue that since children are different from adults in cognitive ability thus they should not be directly involved in studies. Yet, experts in the field have stated that the benefits of involving children in studies of the level of their SWB are sfficient to overcome such limitations. Furthermore, children may be relevant key informants in providing data about their experience. In the past decade, the researchers in the field of positive psychology have focused their attention on positive emotions, such as happiness and satisfaction more than negative emotions. They considered mental health as a positive psychological function and conceptualize it in terms of psychological well-being. However, review of the researche studies showed that despite the orientation of positive psychology toward assessing the children’s subjective/psychological well-being, the frequency of use of the negative emotions scales are considerable in comparison with positive emotions scales, which can be regarded as direction for future research. Finally, it should be noted that the clear differences that can be seen in the theoretical definition of SWB and PWB do not exist in the operational definitions of children’s’ SWB/PWB to the extent that researchers in order to measure these two concepts have used similar compositional measures in many cases. Ethical Considerations Funding This study was funded by the University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences, Tehran, Iran Authors’ contributions All authors contributed to the study design, literature search, study selection, data extraction, methodological quality assessment and data synthesis, interpretation of results and writing of the manuscript. Conflicts of interest The authors declared no conflict of interest. Acknowledgments In this article, all rights relating to references are cited and resources are carefully listed.