Psychometric Assessment of Well-Being Scales
Summary
Psychometric assessment of well-being scales encompasses the systematic evaluation of measurement instruments designed to quantify subjective well-being, mental health, and quality of life. Core objectives include establishing reliability—whether a scale yields consistent scores across time or items—and validity—whether it accurately captures the intended construct. Contemporary practice emphasises unidimensional versus multidimensional structures, ensuring that each scale item contributes coherently to an overarching factor or distinct subdomains. Confirmatory factor analysis and modern item response models are employed to test internal structure, while tests of measurement invariance ascertain equivalence across population subgroups or cultural contexts. Cross-cultural adaptation and translation procedures safeguard semantic and conceptual fidelity, enabling global application. Chronbach’s alpha, intraclass correlation coefficients and fit indices such as RMSEA, CFI and TLI guide authors in refining item sets. Psychometric rigour underpins clinical screening, epidemiological surveillance and intervention evaluation, ensuring that decisions affecting public health and individual care rest on robust quantitative foundations.
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Psychometric Assessment of Well-Being Scales publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in psychometric assessment of well-being scales across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Psychometric assessment: The process of evaluating the measurement properties of a scale, including reliability and validity.
Reliability: The extent to which a scale yields consistent results across administrations or items.
Validity: The degree to which a scale measures the construct it purports to assess.
Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA): A statistical technique to test whether data fit a hypothesised measurement model.
Cronbach’s alpha: A coefficient indicating internal consistency reliability among scale items.
Measurement invariance: The property that a scale measures constructs equivalently across different groups.
References
- Translation and validation of the WHO-5 General well-being index into native language Quechua of the Peruvian South. Heliyon (2023).
- Validation of Chinese version of the 5-item WHO well-being index in type 2 diabetes mellitus patients. BMC Psychiatry (2023).
- Assessing mental well-being in a Sinhala speaking Sri Lankan population: validation of the WHO-5 well-being index. Health and Quality of Life Outcomes (2020).
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