Monica Gonzalez-Carrasco[1], Sara Malo, Ferran Casas, Gemma Crous, Mireia Baena & Dolors Navarro
Journal of Social Research & Policy, Volume: 6, Issue: 2 , Online First Date: December 2015 ISSN: 2067-2640 (print), 2068-9861 (electronic) Abstract: Although
the study of subjective well-being (SWB) has progressively extended to increasingly
younger ages, doubts about the capacity of young children to provide reliable answers
regarding their own SWB have meant less research has been done on children
under 12 years of age. As a consequence, only a few instruments have been
designed for the assessment of SWB in young children - the Personal Well-Being
Index–School Children version (PWI-SC) being one of them. The authors of this
instrument recommend checking respondents’ comprehension of the items and
capacity to transform their own evaluations into a specific figure on a scale
before administering it. Taking this as a starting point, and framed within the
Children’s Worlds project (www.isciweb.org), a sample of 1,109 Spanish children, mainly 8-year-olds,
were presented with various situations (for instance, not being able to go to
the cinema with their parents when they want to), to which they had to provide
both a qualitative answer (explaining how they would feel in their own words)
and a quantitative answer to different types of scales (emoticons to express
levels of satisfaction, a scale of satisfaction from 1 to 5, and one from 0 to
10, both without emoticons). The qualitative answers were classified into
different categories in order to compare them with the quantitative answers to
the same questions. Results show that the highest percentage of cases corresponds
to total consistency between both types of response. Keywords: Subjective Well-Being; Children; Measurement; Data Triangulation; Pre-Testing. |
[1] Postal Address: Universitad de Girona, Institut de Recerca sobre Qualitat de Vida, Plaça Sant Domènec 9, 17071, Girona, Spain. E-mail Address: monica.gonzalez@udg.edu