THE SCHOOL WELL-BEING PROFILE – A VALID INSTRUMENT FOR EVALUATION

Aims: The aim of this study was to verify if the structure of the further developed school well-being questionnaires for pupils in different grades (primary, lower and upper secondary) and for personnel, constituting the School Well-being Profile, fit the theory-based School Well-being Model. The verification was necessary because the questionnaires were altered according to previous studies and thus the instrument, the School Well-being Profile, was introduced. Furthermore, earlier the questionnaires existed only for lower secondary school and now they had been introduced also for primary school pupils, upper secondary school students and for school personnel.
Methods: The present data consisted of all schools that used the freely available, Internet-based School Well-being Profile (http://www10.edu.fi/hyvinvointiprofiili/) during the school year 2007–2008 in Finland. The Profile consists of electronic survey forms and an automatic facility which analyses and produces results on the data. Once the data has been entered into the system, the results can be viewed and printed out in the school for individual classes, grade levels or the whole school. The results can also be stratified by gender. The figures can be compared with the averages of all schools in the database to pinpoint areas where well-being is at a lower or a higher level compared with other schools.
To verify the structure of the School Well-being Profile instrument, confirmatory factor analysis was conducted separately for four different datasets: primary school (N=5003), lower secondary school (N=4674), upper secondary school (N=1616), and for personnel (N=1753).
Results: The data for pupils in each grade showed a good fit (GFI .94 - .97) and the data for personnel resulted in a reasonably good fit (GFI .90). The internal consistencies for the four well-being categories were high, Cronbach’s Alphas varied between .79-.94 in all four datasets.
Conclusions: The results confirmed that the further development of the lower secondary school questionnaire improved it clearly, and the new questionnaires for primary school, upper secondary school and for school personnel resulted in usable instruments, the School Well-being Profile, for evaluating school well-being. Based on the encouraging results also an English version of the instrument was developed and it is in the pilot phase (http://www.schoolwellbeing.eu/).