Peer-reviewed article
A Preliminary Study on the Development of the Child Well-being Self-Report Scale
Eun Chae Jung, Aejin Choi, Dong Chu Kim ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study developed and tested a new scale to measure child well-being from children's own perspectives rather than adult assessments. Researchers identified four key areas affecting well-being: health, relationships, education, and emotion. They created 166 questions initially, refined them through expert review and testing with children aged 6-13 in South Korea, and extracted 28 components across the four areas. The resulting scale showed varying reliability, with relationship, education, and emotion factors performing well but the health factor needing improvement.
Key points
- Four ecological environments identified as most affecting child well-being: health, relationship, education, and emotion
- Scale development involved 133 expert-validated questions refined to 126 through testing with 30 children
- Second validation survey included 107 children aged 6-13 from preschool and elementary schools in Seoul and Gyeonggi-do
- Reliability coefficients ranged from 0.61 (health) to 0.89 (relationship), with education (0.87) and emotion (0.81) factors showing strong reliability
- Final scale extracted 12, 1, 9, and 6 components from health, relationship, education, and emotion factors respectively
Limitations
This is a preliminary study focused on scale development and validation rather than measuring actual child well-being outcomes or testing an intervention. The study was conducted only in South Korea with a relatively small sample, so findings may not generalise to other contexts or populations.
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to develop and validate an evaluation scale of children’s ‘well-being’ from children’s perspectives. First, through theoretical and prior research, four areas of ecological environment that most affect children’s well-being were derived: health, relationship, education, and emotion. Then, 166 questions were developed to measure well-being regarding the four areas. Second, 133 questions were selected through a content validity verification process by five experts, and 126 preliminary questions were extracted by conducting a first preliminary survey of 30 children. The questions were further validated by conducting a second preliminary survey of 107 children aged 6-13 from preschool educational institutions and four different elementary schools located in Seoul and Gyeonggi-do. Third, to extract and find relations to the four areas of ecological environment from the collected data, exploratory factors and reliability coefficients were analyzed and calculated. As a result, 12, 1, 9, and 6 components were extracted from “health factor”, “relationship factor”, “education factor”, and “emotion factor”, respectively. The reliability coefficients were calculated to be .61, .89, .87, and .81 for the respective health, relationship, education, and emotion factors. Based on the findings, suggestions and implications for follow-up studies were discussed.