RESUMO

BACKGROUND: An increasing number of international organisations and national governments have committed to well-being promotion. Unfortunately, important questions regarding how to assess well-being are still unresolved, making policy implementation and evaluation difficult. METHODS: This research expanded on Huppert and So's (Soc Indic Res. 110, 837-861 2013) multidimensional subjective well-being framework by investigating the replicability of the model in two non-European regions (South America, represented by Brazil and Colombia, and Eastern Africa, represented by Uganda), and the United Kingdom. Additionally, previous limitations of the framework were also addressed. ESS Round Six items were crucially improved in terms of temporal and response scale consistency. Bayesian approximate measurement invariance was applied on a sample of 381 young adult participants to test for consistency across countries. RESULTS: The Huppert & So (Soc Indic Res. 110, 837-861 2013) model was found to fairly replicate across non-European regions, where meaningful differences in well-being patterns across regions were observed. Additionally, estimated well-being was related with other well-being measures (Five Ways): Learn and Connect were the strongest predictors of general well-being, with Take Notice and Give being associated with specific aspects of it. CONCLUSIONS: Based on this narrow sample of young adults, it appears the ten-item measure proposed by Huppert & So (Soc Indic Res. 110, 837-861 2013) is useful for assessing population mental health outside of Europe. This is only an initial attempt to assess qualities, so further testing should be done before applying at scale for identifying policy opportunities to address well-being of populations.

Assuntos

Saúde Mental , Qualidade de Vida , Inquéritos e Questionários/normas , Teorema de Bayes , Brasil , Colômbia , Feminino , Saúde Global , Humanos , Masculino , Reprodutibilidade dos Testes , Uganda , Reino Unido , Adulto Jovem

RESUMO

Large-scale educational assessment has been established as source of descriptive, evaluative and interpretative information that influence educational policies worldwide throughout the last third of the twentieth century. In the 1990s the Brazilian Ministry of Education developed the National Basic Education Assessment System (SAEB) that regularly measures management, resource and contextual school features and academic achievement in public and private institutions. In 2005, after significant piloting and review of the SAEB, a new sampling strategy was taken and Prova Brasil became the new instrument used by the Ministry to assess skills in Portuguese (reading comprehension) and Mathematics (problem solving), as well as collecting contextual information concerning the school, principal, teacher, and the students. This study aims to identify which variables are predictors of academic achievement of fifth grade students on Prova Brasil. Across a large sample of students, multilevel models tested a large number of variables relevant to student achievement. This approach uncovered critical variables not commonly seen as significant in light of other achievement determinants, including student habits, teacher ethnicity, and school technological resources. As such, this approach demonstrates the value of MLM to appropriately nuanced educational policies that reflect critical influences on student achievement. Its implications for wider application for psychology studies that may have relevant impacts for policy are also discussed.