Abstract

The potential to make cross-national comparisons is an important aspect of the growing global interest in subjective well-being. Such comparisons offer the prospect of understanding variations in levels of well-being and the factors contributing to it which can be useful for practical and policy initiatives to improve the lives of the population. However, relatively little is known about the extent to which such comparisons are reliable and valid, particularly in relation to children's well-being. We make use of a large-scale pilot survey undertaken in 11 countries with over 16,000 children around the age of 12 to explore this issue. We examine four different multi-item measures of children's subjective well-being, three of which have previously been proposed in the literature. We use multi-group confirmatory factor analysis to assess the extent to which it is valid to make cross-national comparisons using these measures. Overall, our results suggest that it should be possible to compare correlations and regressions between most of the countries in our survey using each of these measures. However, cross-national comparisons of mean scores on the measures is generally not supported by our analysis.