Development of a pragmatic and brief wellbeing tool for public health promotion: the mental wellbeing indicator (MWI)

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new 11-item tool called the Mental Wellbeing Indicator (MWI) to help the public track and understand their mental wellbeing, which could support public health efforts.

Contribution

The paper presents the development and validation of a novel, brief wellbeing tool (MWI) for public health promotion and research.

Findings

The MWI consists of three core constructs: Subjective Wellbeing, Perceived Social Support, and Authenticity.

The 11-item MWI showed strong fit and validity, with Subjective Wellbeing demonstrating the strongest predictive validity.

The tool aligns with existing wellbeing theories and could be useful for public health promotion after further validation.

Abstract

Despite growing emphasis on mental wellbeing as a critical part of health, few tools allow the public to track and understand it. Our aim was to develop a brief wellbeing tool for public health promotion and research that could be offered directly to the public to assist in improving community wellbeing literacy.

The study involved the completion of a single-time, anonymous online survey administered to panel members of an independent market research company. Eligible participants were aged 18 years and over, residing in Australia and not self-identifying as experiencing considerable struggles with emotions or stress. Measures included existing tools theoretically aligned with existing wellbeing indexes (Satisfaction with Life, Psychological Wellbeing Scale, Mental-Health Consortium) and scales capturing theorized elements of state and trait wellbeing across several theoretical conceptions (e.g., positive affect, hope, self-efficacy, self-esteem, social support).

The final sample included 1,267 adults (50.4% male, 32.8% aged 25–44 years) which was split into a training sample (n = 887) for factor identification and item selection, and a test sample for confirmation (n = 380). A series of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses identified three core constructs (Subjective Wellbeing, Perceived Social Support and Authenticity). The final 11-item set fit the data well (i.e., Comparative Fit Index > 0.99). Overall, the three constructs were moderately related to each other and aligned with existing wellbeing theories. Together these were named the Mental Wellbeing Indicator (MWI). Correlations with other indicators including mental health diagnosis and resilience suggested convergent and divergent validity. Predictive validity was demonstrated strongly for Subjective Wellbeing, moderately for Perceived Social Support and weakly for Authenticity.

These findings largely demonstrate the validity and utility of the tool for assessing wellbeing and predicting important outcomes. After further study, the MWI could become a promising wellbeing tool in public health promotion.