Overview
There is a growing body of research on people’s self-reported well-being – that is, their evaluations of, and feelings about, their lives. Although the research literature contains numerous different ideas and measures of self-reported well-being, it commonly includes three core concepts23:
1. Cognitive subjective well-being which is concerned with people’s evaluations of their lives as a whole, or in particular domains
2. Affective subjective well-being which relates to people’s moods and feelings
3. Psychological well-being which focuses on the extent to which people feel their basic
psychological needs are met and their sense of flourishing
There has been a substantial amount of research validating and utilising this conceptual framework with adults, particularly in the US, and also in other Western industrialised countries. However it is less certain how well the framework fits other cultural contexts, or the extent to which it is applicable to children.
The Children’s Worlds survey questionnaire included measures designed to relate to all three of these concepts (see box on the next page), with the intention that the data set will enable researchers to test out the applicability of the concepts to children, cross-nationally and cross- culturally. The detailed analysis required to test out these frameworks will be a task for future work using the Children’s Worlds data. In this chapter we consider three example questions representing each of the three components discussed above:
• satisfaction with life as a whole (cognitive subjective well-being)
• frequency of feeling happy in the past two week (affective subjective well-being)
• feeling positive about the future (psychological well-being)
We look at how children’s responses to each of these three questions varies according to country, age and gender and establish some of the methods of comparison that are utilised in the topic- based chapters that follow.