Measurement features of personal and social well-being in the European social research
Paper dwells upon the theoretical background, as well as the empirical results of tool use offered in the European Social Survey for the assessment of personal and social well-being. The analysis is based on the results of the measurement scale use for emotional well-being, vigorousness, and functionality. As a successful one, the author names the testing of internal coherence and factor validity for the energy scale. For the other two scales, the results are, at best, controversial. This is especially true for the scale of emotional well-being, when it comes to Russian or Ukrainian version of the methodology. Also, author evaluates peculiarities of use in the European Social Survey of the short version of CES-D, – a well-known scale for measuring psychological distress among the general population. It has been found that CES-D is characterized by high theoretical and factor validity, as well as high internal consistency. However, the question is triggered on the specificity of the factor structure of the methodology. Possible explanations in this case are as follows: bipartite emotional experience; biases caused by specific items; a synthesis of two phenomena in the framework of one method. Generally, a number of problems typical for measuring personal and social well-being in the European Social Study have been identified: failure to take into account the broad institutional capacity, eclecticity in the consideration of the phenomenon of personal well-being, and the lack of unification of individual indicators. As a possible solution of these problems, the author considers the appeal to the theoretical and methodological framework of the sociology of psychological distress. In this context, it is promising to assess the scale of emotional well-being and CES-D in the analysis of various components of the stress process, as well as to assess the quality of these scales in different European countries.
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