GRACIELA TONON

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Journal of Social Research & Policy, Vol. 3, Issue 2, December 2012 Journal of Social Research & Policy, Vol. 3, Issue 2, December 2012  ONLINE  F IRSTIntroduction to the Special Issue “International Wellbeing Index”GRACIELA TONON1Universidad Nacional de Lomas de Zamora Universidad de Palermo, Argentina￿e study of quality of life refers to the material (social welfare) and psychosocial (wellbeing) environments. Quality of life has been de￿ned as a concept that implies objective and subjective dimension. ￿e use of domains in the quality of life study allows a more precise measurement than could have been reached through simple questions. In this issue authors from di￿erent countries presented their studies using the WBI (wellbeing index).WBI has two scales: the Personal Wellbeing Index (PWI) and the National Wellbeing Index (NWI), pointed 0 to 10, in which “0” is totally dissatis￿ed and “10” is totally satis￿ed. PWI contains eight items of satisfaction, each one corresponding to a quality of life domain as: standard of living, health, achievement in life, relationships, safety, community-connectedness, future safety, and spirituality/religion. ￿ese eight domains are theoretically embedded, as representing the ￿rst level deconstruction of the global question: ‘How satis￿ed are you with your life as a whole?’. ￿e NWI re￿ects nearly the same domains in the national context. Dr. Robert Cummins from Deakin University, Australia, organized in 2001 ￿e International Wellbeing Group, which currently involves researchers from 49 countries who already had or intends to trial the Index in his/her own country. ￿is Index didn´t remain unchanged over time: this project will undergo controlled evolution as theory and empirical data are brought to bear on its composition. ￿e ￿rst article Life Quality and Wealth: a Qualitative and Quantitative Comparison of A￿uent and Poor People, is written by David Mellor, Robert A. Cummins and Tony Loquet from Australia. Dr. Cummins is the creator of the WBI, and in this opportunity presented with their colleagues a more precise understanding of the di￿erences in personal experience that lead to homeostatic failure, doing qualitative interviews and a quantitative examination of SWB domains. Twenty a￿uent people and 20 people dependent on social welfare completed an interview and the Personal Wellbeing Index. As expected, the two groups di￿ered signi￿cantly in SWB; moreover, the poor group reported a preponderance of negative life experiences while the a￿uent group concentrated on the positive events in their lives. Both the qualitative and quantitative methods identi￿ed the area of ‘relationships’ as representing the greatest degree of divergence between the two groups. ￿is life domain is especially relevant in the maintenance of normative levels of SWB.￿e second article, Personal Well-Being among Spanish Adolescents, by Ferran Casas, Armando Bello,  Mónica  González  and  Mireia  Aligué  from  Catalonia,  Spain,  presented  the  overviews ￿ndings from several samples of 12-16 years old adolescents from Catalonia since 1999 to 2012, suggesting a constant decrease with age of adolescents’ subjective well-being, measured with both a single item on overall life satisfaction and with the PWI. ￿e paper reviews comparative ￿ndings between Catalan samples and samples from regions in other countries and it analyses the very recent results obtained from another Spanish region, and results from a big representative sample of Spanish adolescents (N=5934), limited to the ￿rst scholar course of Spanish compulsory secondary education. ￿e paper has a particular focus in identifying potential additional items 1   Postal Address: Facultad de Ciencias Sociales. Universidad Nacional de Lomas de Zamora. Complejo Universitario, Juan XXIII y ruta provincial 4, Llavallol, Lomas de Zamora, Provincia de Buenos Aires. CP 1832. ARGENTINA. E-mail Address: gracielatonon@hotmail.com6  |  JSRP 2  |  JSRPthat may improve the original version of the PWI, when administered to adolescents. Habib Tiliouine from Algeria presents his article Subjective Wellbeing, Psychological Wellbeing and Satisfaction with Income in the Population of Algeria. It is a study that investigates the relationship between Subjective Wellbeing and Psychological Wellbeing and their distributions in a large sample of 3,173 subjects (males and females) who participated in the 4th Algerian Wellbeing Survey. A variety of components of Subjective Wellbeing (SWB) are used: Satisfaction with life (SWL), Personal Wellbeing Index (PWI), Positive Affect (PA) and Negative Affect (NA), and indicators of Psychological Wellbeing (PWB): Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness, Meaning in Life and Religious Practice. The results indicate that dimensions of SWB and PWB are significantly inter-correlated and are almost similarly distributed in this population and it also shows that both constructs are negatively affected by low incomes. Fermina Rojo-Perez, Gloria Fernandez-Mayoralas, Vicente Rodriguez-Rodriguez, María-João Forjaz, Carmen Rodriguez-Blazquez,  María-Eugenia Prieto-Flores, Jose-Manuel Rojo-Abuin y Pablo Martinez-Martin, from Spain, present their article entitled The Personal Wellbeing among Community Dwelling Older Adults in Spain and Associated Factors. This paper examines the assessment made by older adults on their personal wellbeing as an overall indicator of Quality of Life as well as analyzing associated factors using data from the Pilot Survey of the ELES Project carried out in 2011 among 1,357 people 50 years old or more living in family housing in Spain. The Personal Wellbeing Index (PWI) was used to evaluate the individual wellbeing, taking into account the global score. This study showed that people aged 50 years old and more had a high level of personal wellbeing, higher than that obtained in previous research among Spanish population aged 60 and over. It was found that having good living and personal conditions was directly associated with personal wellbeing. Elena Gurková, Mária Sováriová Soósová, Jozef Džuka, Sylvie Haroková, Katarína Žiaková from Slovak Republic present their article Subjective Quality of Life in Czech and Slovak Nurses: Validity of Czech and Slovak Version of PWI which aim was to investigate the psychometric properties of Slovak and Czech version PWI in population of nurses. The sample for study consisted of 1055 hospital staff nurses from 12 public hospitals. Data were collected using a set of questionnaires that included the Positive Affect Scale, the Negative Affect Scale, and the Personal Well-being Index. The PWI demonstrated good psychometric properties in terms of its factor structure, reliability, convergent, construct and discriminate validity.The article Mediating Factors of Personal Wellbeing in Gifted College Students: Early-College Entrants and Honors College Students by Janette K. Boazman and Michael F. Sayler presents the use of PWI with 213 gifted college students who entered university in either an early-college-entrance program or entered at normal ages and were accepted into an honors college. This study also examined the participants’ general self-efficacy, beliefs about of intelligence, hope, gratitude, religiosity, and resiliency; and assessed any mediating effects they had on personal wellbeing in the high-ability college students. Data analysis included latent transition, general linear model, repeated measures, and regression. Results of the study revealed that dispositional mood and hope-agency were significantly related to the development of personal wellbeing for high-ability students during their first year of college regardless of age. I am grateful for the work of authors and reviewers that make possible the edition of this special issue.Graciela Tonton 6  |  JSRP

Introduction to the Special Issue “International Wellbeing Index”

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