**5. Guidelines for subjective well-being measurement**

In every study, a decision needs to be made on which measurement instrument will be used to measure subjective well-being. Given the increased interest in the study of subjective well-being in education, most likely the number of different instruments and questionnaires for well-being measurement will only increase in the near future. Further on we offer some steps that will help you to choose the most appropriate measurement instrument for your study.

Note that planning a study is a complicated task. If you feel either uncertain or unconfident, we would like to advise you to invite relevant experts to participate in the study to develop the study design, make psychometric analysis, and discuss the practical implementation.

Step 1. Purpose of the study and sample. At this step, it is important to clearly define the purpose of the study and the target sample. For example, the aim of the study might be to monitor the subjective well-being of primary students at school N in order to select classes for intervention programs. Already at this stage, we have to decide how detailed the information about the measured construct that we want to collect should be. Do we need a general index of subjective well-being? How many domains do we want to cover? Is the context important?

Step 2. The definition of the measured construct is a very important step, since it determines what we actually are about to measure. The result will be obtained in relation to this definition. One can focus only on satisfaction and affect, or one can include the measurement of purpose in life, as well as collect information about related constructs, for example, bullying.

Step 3. Choice of the measurement instrument. Based on the previous two steps, we choose the type of the instrument: single-item measures, scales, or multidimensional scales. At this stage, we analyze the quality of the available instruments in terms of its application to our purpose and target sample, its reliability and validity. Since most subjective well-being scales are used quite extensively, a large body of

evidence has been accumulated about their reliability and validity (e.g., see review [76]). However, if you were to adapt the scale from another culture, this information may not be sufficient and a follow-up psychometric study will be necessary for the new adapted version. Also, papers about instrument's quality hardly ever provide the information on DIF, which can be especially important when using the same instrument to compare children from different age cohorts or gender. In this case an additional DIF study is needed.

Step 4. Prepare the instrument for data collection. At this stage, informed consent should be collected in the form that is relevant to the laws of your country. Then the questionnaire should be prepared for the administration (including instructions and other procedures). Recently, the majority of such a study is administered in computer form. In this case the IT platform should be tested and the requirements of the participants' devices should be made and checked.

When preparing the questionnaire, it is important to pay attention to several points. Firstly, how to familiarize your target audience with the chosen testing format? The less prepared the audience, the more attention should be paid to examples in instruction and trial tasks. Secondly, it is necessary to make sure that all instructions are clear and that the survey is intuitive and the form of its presentation should be practical. For example, in computer testing, it is desirable to avoid the need to scroll the page, especially for younger children, since this a) involves an additional skill, b) the continuation of the page may simply not be noticed. Also, if you use a scale, it's a good idea to present it in a table, rather than having each statement individually evaluated, unless you have a special reason to do so. Presenting the scale as a table reduces the cognitive load compared with scoring each statement on the scale individually.

At this stage, some cognitive interviews might be conducted to ensure the clarity of the instructions, test form, and the sentences in the questionnaire itself.

Step 5. Data collection. At this step, it is important to ensure a standardized data collection procedure for the subsequent correct interpretation of the results. The personal information should be treated in a safe and legal (for your country) way.

Step 6. Data analysis. After data have been collected, we can start to analyze them in order to test research hypotheses. At the stage of data analysis, it is important to pay attention to the type of data that you have and use only appropriate statistical methods depending on the data type. In comparative studies, it is important to check the equivalence of construct, method, and items.

Step 7. Interpretation of results and feedback. Above, in section 4, we already described that this is one of the most delicate steps during the study. Treat the results with care. Sometimes the consultation of a practicing psychologist might be needed.

Those are general descriptions of the steps that should be taken to conduct a study and collect data about well-being for any age group and in any context. If you are interested in large-scale assessment for the adult population, you might also check the guidelines provided by OECD [77].

### **6. Conclusion**

In modern education, the subjective well-being of students has become an important goal and is included in assessments in research of all kinds, from studies of relatively small groups of students in the classroom to international comparative studies. The choice of an assessment instrument is one of the significant stages of the *Measuring Well-Being in School and University: Approaches and Challenges DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.106773*

study, which ensures the validity of the interpretation of the results. In our review, we distinguish three groups of instruments for measuring subjective well-being: singleitem measures, scales, and multidimensional scales. The choice of the instrument for a particular study will be determined by its purpose, the amount and detail of information that is planned to be collected, as well as data on the validity and reliability of the instrument. An important part of the study of well-being in education is the preparation of feedback on the results of the study.
