Psychological Well-Being in Children: Developing a Children's Psychological Well-Being Inventory

Abstract

This study aims to generate a standardized and measurable inventory of children’ psychological well-being for children in the age 9 to 12 years old. This inventory was developed based on the theory of Carol D. Ryff’ which stated that psychological well-being comprised 6 dimensions, autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relations, purpose in life, and self-acceptance. This study adapted Gregory’ stages in developing inventory namely defining the Inventory, Determining the Scale, Constructing the items, Testing the Items, Revising the Inventory, Developing criteria. The validity and reliability test was conducted to eighty-one 4th and 5th grade students of an elementary school in Sleman, Yogyakarta. The result of this study was in the form of children’ psychological well-being inventory using Guttman scale by ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answer option. The validity test was done by using product moment analysis by 5% level of significance. By the validity test, there were thirty-four valid items out of fifty items. The reliability test was done by using alpha Cronbach analysis. The obtained score was 0.779 which means that the inventory was reliable. The inventory possessed some criteria which divided into 5 criteria, very high (25.50- 34), high (19.84-25.5), medium (14.17-19.84), low (8.5-14.17) and very low (0 - 8.5). This study suggested the teacher to use this inventory as the basis to provide an accurate service in assisting the students to meet their psychological well-being.