Our “Tools of the Trade” series in Archways highlights the research technology and methodologies used by the Rice ARCHES Initiative.
Measuring Social/Emotional Wellbeing
This week Sophie Clayton, a Research Assistant in the BMED Lab, tells us about social and emotional wellbeing and how these are assessed in Project CHROMA.
When evaluating how effective an intervention is, measuring an individual’s wellbeing (or change in wellbeing) is essential. Individual differences result in diverse emotions and reactions; the wide variability in humans makes assessments difficult to standardize and to apply to all possible subjects. Social and emotional wellbeing assessments, as they are used today, work to make sure researchers ask the right questions to receive answers that measure the same general idea across many individuals.
Social well-being is often defined as an individual’s ability to acquire necessary resources and to coexist peacefully in communities with room for advancement.
Emotional well-being relates to how an individual can handle stressful situations, showing their resilience and ability to generate positive feelings.
Assessments should be structured to ask simple questions that have straightforward answers. In many assessments, subjects are given statements or descriptions and asked to rate how relevant the items are to their current state. These statements could include sentences like “I feel content” or even words like “happy” or “stressed,” and possible responses could range from “Not like me at all” to “Very much like me.”
As mentioned, these types of assessments measure current states of wellbeing. This allows researchers to monitor changes in current states across a period of time, which would account for individuals’ changes based on daily factors. Social and emotional wellbeing assessments taken for a period of time before an intervention and a period of time after an intervention would allow researchers to measure an increase or decrease in average responses from subjects, suggesting how effective their study was.
