Background

Measuring well-being in university settings, if intended for teacher use, requires careful integration of hedonic and eudaimonic elements as well as positive and negative affects. Such instrument, developed and validated by Belykh (2019), was called in English OWL (Optimal Wellbeing for Learning). It was further adapted to the analysis of educational paths in the frame of the current postdoctoral research project on resiliency and wellbeing in academia amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Aims

The objective was to adapt the OWL questionnaire to the pandemic context, include the educational path perspective, as well as address minor validity issues.

Method

The initial 20 items were reconfigured eliminating an item from each of the four dimensions (positive hedonic affect, or PHA; negative hedonic affect, or NHA, positive eudaimonic affect, or PEA, and negative eudaimonic affect, or NEA), based on item to total analysis. Afterwards, two items were added to each dimension based on literature review on socioemotional difficulties in higher education during the COVID pandemic. Finally, the instruction was modified. Initially it focused on the frequency of certain emotions in the respondents' daily life. When adapted to the educational path perspective, the participants were asked to assess, on a scale of 0 to 10, the way their emotionality had changed. The number 5 was to be considered a neutral point, 0 to 4 as a range of decrease and 6 to 10 as an increase range. 0 would mean the person no longer experienced the emotion, and 10 meant the emotion had become much more frequent as compared to the prepandemic situation.

Results

The adapted version's validity propertied are excellent: α = .85 for the total of 24 items, varying between α =.74 and α =.85 at the dimensions level.

Conclusion

By offering good psychometric properties and a radial diagram visualization, this new tool can help teachers to quickly understand the well-being dynamics in their groups after significant events.