Abstract

The Personal Well-being Index-School Children version (PWI-SC) by Cummins and Lau (2005) is among the few instruments devoted to assessing the subjective well-being of children. However, only a handful of studies have used this instrument and in a limited number of countries. This article presents an extended version of the 7-item version of the PWI-SC. The instrument was administered to a sample of children aged 10-12 in Spain (N = 371) together with a single-item scale on overall life satisfaction (OLS) and an additional item on satisfaction with food. The responses obtained were analysed in order to determine its psychometric properties and check whether one additional item would improve its qualities. The models we present here resulting from Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) show good fit statistics with both 7 and 8 items. Our analysis confirms that the inclusion of a domain on satisfaction with food - a proposed new indicator to study subjective well-being in this age group - contributes to the PWI-SC with unique variance (6.7 %), displaying an increase of 3.6 % in shared variance.