Direct and indirect measurement of school students well-being with the optimal scale technique.

The new approach to well-being of positive psychology puts emphasis on normal states of moods, and on all kind of sources that promote well-being in adolescents. Interventions aimed at enhancing a renewed and more pleasurable state of mind are invented, proposed and applied more and more to adolescents. However, traditional measurements tap self-esteem, depression, tendency to diverse forms of psychopathology but not the core of well-being. Therefore, a new instrument to measure well-being and its correlates would be very useful . To this aimed, some 80 written interviews were conducted with high school student, by relying on the sentence completion technique (I would be happy if… or What I fear most is…). The most frequent responses were used to write 45 sentences, in the multiple choice format (example: I am stimulated to study when (a) I like the topic (b) I have no other engagements (c) I like the way the teacher interacts with us (d) I may fail the whole year (e) my parents punish me for low grades) The questionnaire was presented to a sample of 1200 students in Lombardy (Italy) region, along with other measures such as Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, Alexithymia, the PANAS questionnaire, School satisfaction scale, Life satisfaction scale. The responses to the multiple choice questionnaire were analyzed according to the Categorical Factor Analysis or Multiple correspondence analysis (Greenacre, 2007) and yielded three factors : (1) a general life adaptation scale, (2) Psychological Harmony with parents, (3) Harmony (wellbeing) in school. Cronbach’s Alpha were moderate (ranging from .79 to .64 for the three scales). What is new in this approach is the scaling of item only indirectly liked to wellbeing, for instance attitudes towards policemen, friends, teachers, drinking and drugs, first sexual intercourse and love affairs. The three scales displayed moderate but significant correlations with Conscientiousness, Life satisfaction, Alexithymia (reversed) and contributed to the construct validity of the scale.