OECD Conference on New Frontiers in Subjective Well-being Measurement, 4 March 2024, OECD Conference Centre, Paris, France and online

1. Asking younger children about
their well-being
Gwyther Rees
UNICEF Innocenti Global Office of Research and Foresight

2. Self-reported well-being
Self-reported well-being
Subjective well-being Psychological well-being
Cognitive Affective
Life satisfaction
Satisfaction with different
aspects of life
Positive
emotions
Negative
emotions
For example (Ryff, 1989):
● Self-acceptance
● Environmental mastery
● Autonomy
● Positive relations
● Purpose in life
● Personal growth

3. Affect
Activated
Deactivated
Pleasant
Unpleasant
Russell, J.A. (1980) A Circumplex Model of Affect.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 1161-1178.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0077714
Sad Happy
Bored Calm
Stressed Full of energy

4. Affect

5. Life satisfaction and domain satisfactions
• Single item for life satisfaction
• Same approach for various domain satisfactions (family, friends, health ..)
• 0 to 10 for 10-year-olds, 5-point emoticon scale for 8-year-olds
• Multi-item life satisfaction, based on Huebner’s SLSS*:
• I enjoy my life
• My life is going well
• I have a good life
• The things that happen in my life are excellent
• I like my life
• I am happy with my life
• 0 to 10 agreement for 10-year-olds, 5-point emoticon scale for 8-year-olds
* Huebner, E. S. (1991). Initial Development of the Student’s Life Satisfaction Scale. School Psychology
International, 12(3), 231–240. http://doi.org/10.1177/0143034391123010

6. Life satisfaction

7. Life satisfaction: Children and adults
Child data at 15 years old from PISA 2018. Adult data from Gallup World Survey 2017 to 2019

8. Psychological well-being
Six items based on concepts from Ryff (1989)
• I like being the way I am
• I am good at managing my daily responsibilities
• People are generally friendly towards me
• I have enough choice about how I spend my time
• I feel that I am learning a lot at the moment
• I feel positive about my future
Agreement scale
Ryff, C. D. (1989). Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological
well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(6), 1069.

9. A different approach
Home School Community
Love / care
There are people in my family
who care about me
My teachers care about me
Adults in my local area are
kind to children
Support
If I have a problem, people in
my family will help me
If I have a problem at school
my teachers will help me
If I have a problem there are
people in my local area who
will help me
Safety I feel safe at home I feel safe at school
I feel safe when I walk
around in the area I live in
Respect
My parent(s) listen to me and
take what I say into account
My teachers listen to me and
take what I say into account
Adults in my area listen to
children and take them
seriously
Participation
My parents and I make
decisions about my life
together
At school I have opportunities
to make decisions about
things that are important to
me
In my local area, I have
opportunities to participate in
decisions about things that
are important to children

10. Summary
• Cognitive testing and psychometric analysis supports asking well-being
questions of children from 8 years old
• Response options are a key issue
• Challenges in translation, particularly emotions
• Partial measurement invariance
• Difficult to explain cross-country variations
• Policy relevance may be primarily within rather than between countries
• Are ‘whole life’ assessments the most effective way of asking people
about their well-being?