The structure of children's subjective well being
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Date
2021-06
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Researchgate
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. The data source includes a sample of 92,782 participants
selected from 35 countries (girls = 49.7%) in two age groups (10- and 12-years-old).
We found a good fit for the four-factor confirmatory factor model of children’s subjective
well-being. Correlations between the various latent factors were as anticipated—with
positive correlations between the life satisfaction components and positive affect, and
negative correlations with negative affect. We further found a good fit for the hierarchical
structural model of children’s subjective well-being. Finally, we found the tenability of
measurement invariance across age and gender. The study extends the generalizability
of the hierarchical structural configuration of the subjective well-being to child samples,
and provides a viable model to explore correlates and predictors of children’s subjective
well-being using the full conceptual model. Finally, we propound the tenability of a
quadripartite hierarchical conceptual model of children’s subjective well-being.
Description
Keywords
Children’s subjective well-being, Confirmatory factor analysis, Hierarchical structural model, Children’s worlds survey, Structure of children’s subjective well-being
Citation
Savahl S. et al. (2021) The Structure of Children’s Subjective Well-being. Front. Psychol. 12:650691. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.650691