Exploring three measures of student wellbeing

There has been limited consensus on how young people's wellbeing should be measured (O'Hare & Gutierrez, 2012). One approach, suggested by Lau and Bradshaw (2010), is that people's subjective judgments capture the essence of wellbeing. Following from Lau and Bradshaw's approach, in this chapter the authors report on a study that sought young adolescents' subjective judgments using three different wellbeing instruments. A purposive sample of 1930 South Australian middle-school students aged 11-16 completed three different measures of wellbeing. Analysis of these instruments indicated that they all require some modification to make them better suited as measures of the subjective wellbeing of young people in the middle-school years. Using the three scales together, the study indicated that the majority (55%) of students were flourishing, a large proportion (39%) had moderate mental health, and a small proportion (about 6%) were languishing.