Measuring Subjective Well-Being of High School Students: Between the Desired and the Real

Subjective well-being of high-school students depends on the relationship of the desired and the real. This distance creates conditions for the development of self-regulation and motivation for achievement. The article presents a study of the structure of subjective well-being (SWB) of senior schoolchildren. The study involved 3,282 students in grades 7–11 living in the Tyumen Region of the Russian Federation. The instrumentation used in the study was the author-developed questionnaire based on the questionnaire of The International Survey of Children’s Well-Being – Children's World. The authors suggest that the study of subjective well-being of high school students should more accurately and reliably measure children's desires and evaluations. In addition to the Family, School, Health, and Safety factors, the factor analysis allowed us to identify new factors – Agency and Romance which received high factor loadings. Dispersing the factors of SWB of high school students in the system of desired and real evaluations allowed us to identify internal contradictions. The research design offers the high school students to answer identical questions from two perspectives: how they evaluate the fact that a particular indicator is present in their lives (real level), and how important it is to them (desired level). In the system of evaluations of SWB by high school students, the desired level of factors appeared to be slightly higher than the real one. A two-stage cluster analysis in the space of selected factors made it possible to divide schoolchildren into 3 cluster groups: Romantics, Conformists, and Rebels. The study proves once again that there is no universal formula for well-being. Analysis of the weight coefficients of the desired and real level of SWB in all three groups demonstrated that those more satisfied and prosperous, in whom the structure of all SWB factors is harmoniously correlated are the Romantics, whereas the low level of SWB is noted in Rebels.