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Measures of psychological well-being
[New page 6 November 2012: last updated 9 June 2020]
This page will list scales to measure psychological well-being, tried and tested in the field on general populations. Scales tested on students will not be listed, unless they have also been used on general populations. Links to scales used in the SSRC Survey Unit Quality of Life in Britain surveys are on page Abstracts, data and documentation
For a theoretical underpinning see:
Maslow, AH (1943). A theory of human motivation
(Psychological Review, 50 (4), 370–396)
In chronological order:
Allister M Macmillan
The Health Opinion Survey: Technique for estimating prevalence of psychoneurotic and related types of disorder in communities
(Monograph Supplement 7, Psychological Reports, 1957, 3, 325-339, Southern Universities Press)
The Health Opinion Survey Scale
[Macmillan was the initiator of the so-called Stirling County Studies, who conducted the first general population survey to have simultaneous psychiatric assessments in a mobile clinic.]
Himmelweit & Turner (1982)
Social and Psychological Antecedents of Depression: A Longitudinal Study from Adolescence to Early Adulthood of a Non-clinical Population.
Life-Span Development and Behaviour, Vol 4, 316-344, Academic Press 1982
John R. Crawford* and Julie D. Henry
The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS):
Construct validity, measurement properties and normative data in a large non-clinical sample
Watson, D., Clark, L. A., & Tellegan, A. (1988).
Development and validation of brief measures of positive and
negative affect: The PANAS scales.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(6), 1063–1070.
David Watson and Lee Anna Clark
THE PANAS-X Manual for the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule - Expanded Form
Ed Diener
The Satisfaction with Life Scale
(PANAS; Watson et al., 1988)
Worksheet 3.1 The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS;
William Pavot and Ed Diener
Review of the Satisfaction with Life scale
Psychological Assessment, 1993, Vol , No 2, 164-172
Duane F Alwin
Feeling Thermometers Versus 7-point Scales
Sociological Methods and Research, 25, 3, 1997
Tennant R, Joseph S, Stewart-Brown S. (2007)
The Affectometer 2: a measure of positive mental health in UK populations
Qual Life Res. 2007 May;16(4):687-95. Epub 2007 Feb 1.
Bond L, Kearns A, Mason P, Tannahill C, Egan M, Whitely E.
Exploring the relationships between housing, neighbourhoods and mental wellbeing for residents of deprived areas.
BMC Public Health 2012;12:48.
Linton, Dieppe & Medina-Lara
Review of 99 self-report measures for assessing well-being in adults: exploring dimensions of well-being and developments over time (BMJ Open, July 2016)
. . is an excellent paper which reviews many instruments and lists many references new to me. However it does not include some sources listed below and on other pages on this site for early development work in the UK, USA and elsewhere during the 1970s and 1980s.
Liu and Cernat
Item-by-item versus Matrix Questions: A Web Survey Experiment
Social Science Computer Review 2016
Felicia A Huppert
Measurement Matters
(Paper 2, Measuring Well-being Series, Sep 2017)
A recent article of mine (2017) is:
Properties of measurement scales: comparison of 0-10 scales used in different surveys (pdf 27pp)
which examines the use of (mostly) 0—10 scales in selected surveys and demonstrates wide variations in individual response patterns. Data sources used are:
SSRC Quality of Life in Britain (1971-1975)
ONS Well-being survey, Unrestricted Access Teaching Data Set (April 2011)
ONS Well-being survey (merged data set April – August 2011)
British Social Attitudes (2008 and 2013)
European Social Survey (Wave 6, 2012)
There’s a particularly interesting article The Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS):
development and UK validation which lists that and other scales used in the measurement of
mental health. This scale has recently been used in Scotland (details on Measuring Mental Well-being). To date I have not found a single site listing the contents of all the different scales together with their statistical properties, and certainly none with any operational or critical assessments. Part of the problem is that academics and others tend not (or do not have time) to read outside their own narrow specialisms, so there is overlapping of work in mental health, clinical and social psychology, sociology, political science, econometrics etc which never seems to be compared or co-ordinated. In any case, the questionnaires I developed with Mark Abrams in the early 1970s anticipate most of this stuff by 40 years or so, albeit with much smaller samples. Some of our items were taken from even earlier work by Allister Macmillan, initiator of the so-called Stirling County Studies, who conducted the first general population survey to have simultaneous psychiatric assessments in a mobile clinic.
See also Schwarz, S A Proposal for Measuring Value Orientations across Nations
This page will list scales to measure psychological well-being, tried and tested in the field on general populations. Scales tested on students will not be listed, unless they have also been used on general populations. Links to scales used in the SSRC Survey Unit Quality of Life in Britain surveys are on page Abstracts, data and documentation
For a theoretical underpinning see:
Maslow, AH (1943). A theory of human motivation
(Psychological Review, 50 (4), 370–396)
In chronological order:
Allister M Macmillan
The Health Opinion Survey: Technique for estimating prevalence of psychoneurotic and related types of disorder in communities
(Monograph Supplement 7, Psychological Reports, 1957, 3, 325-339, Southern Universities Press)
The Health Opinion Survey Scale
[Macmillan was the initiator of the so-called Stirling County Studies, who conducted the first general population survey to have simultaneous psychiatric assessments in a mobile clinic.]
Himmelweit & Turner (1982)
Social and Psychological Antecedents of Depression: A Longitudinal Study from Adolescence to Early Adulthood of a Non-clinical Population.
Life-Span Development and Behaviour, Vol 4, 316-344, Academic Press 1982
John R. Crawford* and Julie D. Henry
The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS):
Construct validity, measurement properties and normative data in a large non-clinical sample
Watson, D., Clark, L. A., & Tellegan, A. (1988).
Development and validation of brief measures of positive and
negative affect: The PANAS scales.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(6), 1063–1070.
David Watson and Lee Anna Clark
THE PANAS-X Manual for the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule - Expanded Form
Ed Diener
The Satisfaction with Life Scale
(PANAS; Watson et al., 1988)
Worksheet 3.1 The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS;
William Pavot and Ed Diener
Review of the Satisfaction with Life scale
Psychological Assessment, 1993, Vol , No 2, 164-172
Duane F Alwin
Feeling Thermometers Versus 7-point Scales
Sociological Methods and Research, 25, 3, 1997
Tennant R, Joseph S, Stewart-Brown S. (2007)
The Affectometer 2: a measure of positive mental health in UK populations
Qual Life Res. 2007 May;16(4):687-95. Epub 2007 Feb 1.
Bond L, Kearns A, Mason P, Tannahill C, Egan M, Whitely E.
Exploring the relationships between housing, neighbourhoods and mental wellbeing for residents of deprived areas.
BMC Public Health 2012;12:48.
Linton, Dieppe & Medina-Lara
Review of 99 self-report measures for assessing well-being in adults: exploring dimensions of well-being and developments over time (BMJ Open, July 2016)
. . is an excellent paper which reviews many instruments and lists many references new to me. However it does not include some sources listed below and on other pages on this site for early development work in the UK, USA and elsewhere during the 1970s and 1980s.
Liu and Cernat
Item-by-item versus Matrix Questions: A Web Survey Experiment
Social Science Computer Review 2016
Felicia A Huppert
Measurement Matters
(Paper 2, Measuring Well-being Series, Sep 2017)
A recent article of mine (2017) is:
Properties of measurement scales: comparison of 0-10 scales used in different surveys (pdf 27pp)
which examines the use of (mostly) 0—10 scales in selected surveys and demonstrates wide variations in individual response patterns. Data sources used are:
SSRC Quality of Life in Britain (1971-1975)
ONS Well-being survey, Unrestricted Access Teaching Data Set (April 2011)
ONS Well-being survey (merged data set April – August 2011)
British Social Attitudes (2008 and 2013)
European Social Survey (Wave 6, 2012)
There’s a particularly interesting article The Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS):
development and UK validation which lists that and other scales used in the measurement of
mental health. This scale has recently been used in Scotland (details on Measuring Mental Well-being). To date I have not found a single site listing the contents of all the different scales together with their statistical properties, and certainly none with any operational or critical assessments. Part of the problem is that academics and others tend not (or do not have time) to read outside their own narrow specialisms, so there is overlapping of work in mental health, clinical and social psychology, sociology, political science, econometrics etc which never seems to be compared or co-ordinated. In any case, the questionnaires I developed with Mark Abrams in the early 1970s anticipate most of this stuff by 40 years or so, albeit with much smaller samples. Some of our items were taken from even earlier work by Allister Macmillan, initiator of the so-called Stirling County Studies, who conducted the first general population survey to have simultaneous psychiatric assessments in a mobile clinic.
See also Schwarz, S A Proposal for Measuring Value Orientations across Nations