Scottish Surveys Core Questions 2022

1.8 Mental Wellbeing Scoring

Mental wellbeing is measured using the shortened Warwick–Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS) questionnaire in the SSCQ.

For background, the WEMWBS has 14 items designed to assess: positive affect (optimism, cheerfulness, relaxation) and satisfying interpersonal relationships and positive functioning (energy, clear thinking, self-acceptance, personal development, mastery and autonomy). The scale uses positively worded statements with a five-item scale ranging from “1 - none of the time” to “5 - all of the time”. The total score is the sum of these responses across the 14 questions. The scale therefore runs from 14 for the lowest levels of mental wellbeing to 70 for the highest.

SWEMWBS, as asked in the SSCQ, is a shortened version of WEMWBS which is Rasch compatible. This means the seven items included have undergone a more rigorous test for internal consistency than the 14 item scale and have superior scaling properties. The seven items relate more to functioning than to feeling and therefore offer a slightly different perspective on mental wellbeing. However, the correlation between WEMWBS and SWEMWBS is high at 95.4%. The SWEMWBS scale runs from seven for the lowest levels of mental wellbeing to 35 for the highest.

SWEMWBS statements are as follows:

• I've been feeling optimistic about the future
• I've been feeling useful
• I've been feeling relaxed
• I've been dealing with problems well
• I've been thinking clearly
• I've been feeling close to other people
• I've been able to make up my own mind about things

Peaks at multiples of seven are produced by column effects, where respondents are more likely to place answers down a column giving the same response for each question. SWEMWBS scores undergo a metric conversion to correct somewhat for this effect and produce a distribution that is closer to normal, also reducing the boundary effect at the scale maximum of 35.