Well-being measures for younger children

Understanding variations in children’s well-being is key to addressing inequalities. It is especially useful to understand children’s own perspectives, although there is a lack of short questionnaires using simple language which can be administered to younger children (or in situations when testing-time is limited). Here we first present the VSWQ-C, a Very Short Well-Being Questionnaire for Children, which captures health-related quality-of-life in a brief questionnaire for both older and younger child responders. We provide preliminary validation evidence for this new measure from two English samples of children aged 6–7 and 9–10 years. Next, we also adapted an existing measure of children’s emotional well-being (10-item Positive and Negative Effect Schedule for Children; Ebesutani et al., 2012), again to be suitable for a younger cohort. Our adaptation, the Definitional Positive and Negative Effect Schedule for Children (dPANAS-C), provides children as young as 6 with age-appropriate definitions of questionnaire vocabulary. We again present preliminary validation evidence from 9–10 year olds, as well as children 6–7 years (i.e., 1–2 years younger than the original version of this questionnaire had been psychometrically developed for). We looked too at demographic influences, and show that older children report greater well-being (in the VSWQ-C) as well as lower negative affect (in the dPANAS-C), but without gender differences. Our findings show that our tools eliciting self-reports of well-being are valuable and valid instruments for children as young as 6 years, with acceptable reliability and strong convergent validity.