Background

Helping professionals often need to inform their work by rapidly assessing the well-being of their clients. The ideal well-being measure for this application would be brief, simple to score and interpret, and appropriate for use every day.

Aims

We examined the psychometric properties of a novel well-being assessment method developed by Seity LLC for rapid, daily use. The method takes less than a minute to complete and asks users to rate four dimensions of well-being (energy, direction, belonging, and joy) with a 5-point, “happy face” response scale. The combined well-being score was compared to well-being assessments from two established measures that take more time to administer and are poorly suited for daily use. Data were also obtained to determine whether the four dimensions underlying the Seity measure actually measure energy, direction, belonging, and joy.

Method

693 respondents were recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). All completed the Seity well-being assessment, versions of the Flourishing Scale (Diener et al., 2009) and the Short Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale (Ng Fat et al., 2017) modified for daily use, and multi-item scales that researchers have used to separately assess energy, direction, belonging, and joy. Respondents who missed attention checks or showed other signs of disengaged responding were excluded from the final analysis, which used structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine the relationship of the Seity well-being measure to the two other well-being measures, and the relationship of the energy, direction, belonging, and joy responses to the scales measuring each of those constructs.

Results

The results demonstrated that the Seity well-being measure is strongly correlated with established well-being measures. The SEM analysis also provided insight into the degree to which energy, direction, belonging, and joy contribute both shared and unique variance to well-being.

Conclusion

Practitioners can use the Seity tool to assess their clients’ well-being every day. Further insights can be obtained by examining the individual dimension responses to identify strengths and challenges.