Development of an Implicit Well-Being Measure for Youths Using the Implicit Association Test

Given the important limitations of direct (explicit) measures in psychological research with children, various scholars have focused on developing indirect (implicit) measures for different psychological constructs. However, children’s well-being has traditionally been assessed in an explicit and direct way. For this reason, the first goal of the present research was to develop a new instrument to assess children’s and adolescents’ well-being using the Implicit Association Test (WB-IAT-Y). The second aim was to examine the relation between direct and indirect well-being measures. In this study, 358 primary and secondary school students answered the WB-IAT-Y, the Psychological Well-being Scales, and the World Health Organization – Five Well-Being Index. Finally, an expert conducted a semi-structured interview with each participant, asking about satisfaction with life in the main domains for children (i.e., family life, friends, school, and overall life satisfaction). The WB-IAT-Y showed good internal consistency and adequate construct validity. Factorial analyses indicated that this measure acted as an indirect measure. As in previous research, the WB-IAT-Y correlated weakly with the two well-being direct measures, and it showed the strongest correlation with the semi-structured interview conducted by an expert. To conclude, the new WB-IAT-Y instrument is a useful measure to assess indirect well-being for youths. We suggest that it is important to evaluate children’s and adolescents’ well-being using both direct and indirect measures in order to assess conscious and unconscious processing of self-relevant information.