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Children’s well-being in Croatia: The Validation of the Croatian versions of the Students' Life Satisfaction Scale (SLSS), Brief Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale (BMSLSS), and the Positive and Negative Affect Scale for Children (PANAS-C

Thematic importance: In the last decade, there was a substantial growth in children’s well-being investigations, which made considerable progress in understanding the correlates, antecedents, and consequences of children’s well-being. In line with the multidimensionality and broadness of the well-being construct, there are many different assessment tools of various lengths and structures specifically designed for measuring child and adolescent well-being. Despite an agreement about the importance of examining well-being of children, there are many different approaches to well-being measurement and there is no consensus on which indicators provide best insights into this construct. Introduction and objectives: In order to effectively promote high levels of children’s well-being, further work is required to add greater precision to the psychometric characteristics of the children’s well-being measures. Thus, the aim of this study was to investigate the psychometric properties and associations between different scales assessing children’ optimal experiences and functioning: Students' Life Satisfaction Scale (SLSS), Brief Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale (BMSLSS), and the Positive and Negative Affect Scale for Children (PANAS-C). Method: The research was conducted as a part of a longitudinal project „Child Well-Being in Family Context (CHILD-WELL)” study financed by Croatian Science Foundation, within the first measurement wave among 1548 children (age range 8-13 years ; average age =10.53, SD=1.15 ; Nmale=764, Nfemale=784). Using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), we evaluated the factor structure of the scales, and examined their reliability, criterion, and convergent validity and interrelations. Results: The results revealed that the hypothesized one-factor structure of the SLSS and BMSLSS, and two-factor structure of the PANAS-C provide a good fit to the data. Moreover, the three scales also showed high reliabilities, correlations, and high convergence with one-item measure of children’s well-being. Conclusions and implications: These findings strengthen empirical evidence for the use of the Croatian-language versions of SLSS, BMSLSS, and the PANAS-C as a reliable and valid set of indicators of children’s’ well-being, which further shows that these indicators work well within different cultural contexts.

Children’s well-being indicators, SLSS, BMSLSS, PANAS-C, Scale Validation

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