How I Feel About My School—Adaptation and Validation of an Educational Well-Being Measure among Young Children in Sweden

Rasmus Riad, Mara Westling Allodi, Eva Siljehag, Carina Wikman, Tamsin Ford and Sven Bölte
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Rasmus Riad: Department of Special Education, Stockholm University, 11419 Stockholm, Sweden
Mara Westling Allodi: Department of Special Education, Stockholm University, 11419 Stockholm, Sweden
Eva Siljehag: Department of Special Education, Stockholm University, 11419 Stockholm, Sweden
Carina Wikman: Department of Special Education, Stockholm University, 11419 Stockholm, Sweden
Tamsin Ford: Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1TN, UK
Sven Bölte: Center of Neurodevelopmental Disorders (KIND), Centre for Psychiatry Research, Department of Women’s and Children’s Health, Karolinska Institutet & Stockholm Health Care Services, Region Stockholm, 11330 Stockholm, Sweden

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 10, 1-14

Abstract: The well-being of children has received increasing attention in recent years. Nevertheless, we lack adequate brief self-report tools that enable us to consider young children’s well-being in policy evaluations and educational research. This study describes the adaptation and first validation of the Swedish version of How I Feel About My School (HIFAMS), a subjective well-being questionnaire suitable for children aged 4 to 12 years, which was originally developed in the United Kingdom (UK). Descriptive statistics with analysis of psychometric properties and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) are based on the perceived well-being of 228 children in preschool and school aged 5 to 8 years old. The CFA endorsed a good fit to a one-factor model, and the scale showed moderate internal consistency ( r ? = 0.63). The results are largely in line with the findings of the original HIFAMS. We conclude that the Swedish version can be applied in early preschool/school settings and could provide first-hand information about children’s well-being from the first years of education until elementary school grades. Practitioners in early education settings might benefit from HIFAMS assessments when seeking to understand children’s current well-being to provide support to children with special educational needs or children at risk for mental health issues. Researchers could use the HIFAMS to standardize child well-being evaluations in policy evaluations and interventional studies.

Keywords: well-being; child self-report measures; young children; early childhood education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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