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Assessing Well-Being pp 247–266Cite as

New Measures of Well-Being

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Part of the Social Indicators Research Series book series (SINS,volume 39)

Abstract

We present new measures of well-being to assess the following concepts: 1. Psychological Well-Being (PWB); 2. Positive Feelings, Negative Feelings, and the balance between the two (SPANE-P, N, B); and 3. Positive Thinking. The PWB scale is a short 8–item summary survey of the person’s self-perceived functioning in important areas such as relationships, self-esteem, purpose and meaning, and optimism. The scale is substantially correlated with other psychological well-being scales, but is briefer. The scale provides a single overall psychological well-being score and does not yield scores for various components of well-being. The Scale of Positive and Negative Experience (SPANE) yields a score for positive experience and feelings (6 items), a score for negative experience and feelings (6 items), and the two can be combined to create an experience balance score. This 12-item brief scale has a number of desirable features compared to earlier measures of positive and negative feelings. In particular, the scale assesses with a few items a broad range of negative and positive experiences and feelings, not just those of a certain type, and is based on the frequency of feelings during the past month. A scale to measure Positive Thinking is also presented. Basic psychometric statistics are presented for the scales based on 573 college students at five universities.

Keywords

  • Life Satisfaction
  • Negative Feeling
  • Positive Feeling
  • Positive Thinking
  • Social Indicator Research

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-champaign, Champaign, IL 61820, USA

    Ed Diener

  2. East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858, USA

    Derrick Wirtz

  3. Singapore Management University, Singapore 178903

    William Tov

  4. Department of Psychology, College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ 08628, USA

    Chu Kim-Prieto

  5. Department of Psychology, California State University, East Bay, Hayward, CA 94542, USA

    Dong-won Choi

  6. Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904

    Shigehiro Oishi

Authors
  1. Ed Diener
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  2. Derrick Wirtz
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  3. Robert Biswas-Diener
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  4. William Tov
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  5. Chu Kim-Prieto
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  6. Dong-won Choi
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  7. Shigehiro Oishi
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Correspondence to Ed Diener .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. Psychology, University of Illinois, 603 E. Daniel St, Champaign, IL 61820, USA

    Prof Ed Diener

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Diener, E. et al. (2009). New Measures of Well-Being. In: Diener, E. (eds) Assessing Well-Being. Social Indicators Research Series, vol 39. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2354-4_12

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