The structure of children's subjective well-being

Abstract

Research on children’s quality of life and subjective well-being has advanced over the past decade largely as a result of developments in childhood theory, children’s rights legislation, and the shift toward positive social science. However, in line with the uncertainty regarding the conceptualization of subjective well-being, the structural configuration of children’s subjective well-being has not been considered in the literature. In the current study, we present and test a model of children’s subjective well-being, which includes global (context-free items assessing overall and general well-being, without reference to a specific aspect of life) and specific (domain-based items assessing a specific aspect of life) cognitive components, and positive and negative affect. We further test the fit structure of a hierarchical structural (second-order) model of children’s subjective well-being. Finally, we test the measurement invariance of the hierarchical model across age and gender. We use data from the third Wave of the Children’s Worlds Survey.