Support for a general factor of well-being

Longo, Ylieno, Coyne, Iain, Joseph, Stephen and Gustavsson, Petter (2016) Support for a general factor of well-being. Personality and Individual Differences . ISSN 0191-8869

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Abstract

Well-being is typically defined as positive feeling (e.g. happiness), positive functioning (e.g. competence, meaning) or a combination of the two. Recent evidence indicates that well-being indicators belonging to different categories can be explained by single “general” factor of well-being (e.g. Jovanovic, 2015). We further test this hypothesis using a recent well-being scale, which includes indicators of positive feeling and positive functioning (Huppert & So, 2013). While the authors of the scale originally identified a two-factor structure, in view of recent evidence, we hypothesize that the two-factor solution may be due to a method effect of different items being measured with different rating scales. In study 1, we use data from the European Social Survey round 3 (n = 41,461) and find that two factors have poor discriminant validity and, after using a bifactor model to account for different rating scales, only the general factor is reliable. In study 2, we eliminate method effects by using the same rating scale across items, recruit a new sample (n = 507), and find that a one-factor model fits the data well. The results support the hypothesis that well-being indicators, typically categorized as “positive feeling” and “positive functioning,” reflect a single general factor.

Item Type: Article
RIS ID: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/785571
Keywords: Structure of well-being; flourishing; factor analysis; unidimensionality; positive feeling; positive functioning; hedonic well-being; eudaimonic well-being
Schools/Departments: University of Nottingham, UK > Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Education
University of Nottingham, UK > Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > School of Medicine > Division of Psychiatry and Applied Psychology
University of Nottingham, UK > Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > School of Medicine
Identification Number: 10.1016/j.paid.2016.03.082
Depositing User: Longo, Ylenio
Date Deposited: 14 Apr 2016 10:10
Last Modified: 04 May 2020 17:46
URI: https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/32767

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