The Oxford Happiness Questionnaire: a compact scale for the measurement of psychological well-being

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Abstract

An improved instrument, the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (OHQ), has been derived from the Oxford Happiness Inventory, (OHI). The OHI comprises 29 items, each involving the selection of one of four options that are different for each item. The OHQ includes similar items to those of the OHI, each presented as a single statement which can be endorsed on a uniform six-point Likert scale. The revised instrument is compact, easy to administer and allows endorsements over an extended range. When tested against the OHI, the validity of the OHQ was satisfactory and the associations between the scales and a battery of personality variables known to be associated with well-being, were stronger for the OHQ than for the OHI. Although parallel factor analyses of OHI and the OHQ produced virtually identical statistical results, the solution for the OHQ could not be interpreted. The previously reported factorisability of the OHI may owe more to the way the items are formatted and presented, than to the nature of the items themselves. Sequential orthogonal factor analyses of the OHQ identified a single higher order factor, which suggests that the construct of well-being it measures is uni-dimensional. Discriminant analysis has been employed to produce a short-form version of the OHQ with eight items.

Section snippets

Participants

One hundred and seventy-two undergraduate students of Oxford Brookes University and their friends and relations (66 men, 99 women, seven unspecified) took part in the study. Ages ranged from 13 to 68 (M=30.9, SD=12.9) years.

Measures

Respondents were invited to complete and return a self-report questionnaire constructed from the OHI, the OHQ, and a number of published scales that are known to correlate with well-being. These were the Extraversion, Neuroticism and Psychoticism sub-scales of the short form

Scale reliabilities

Both the OHI and the OHQ demonstrated high scale reliabilities with values α(167)=0.92 and α(168)=0.91 respectively. The inter-item correlations for the OHI ranged from−0.03 to 0.58, mean 0.28, and the corresponding values for the OHQ were −0.04 to 0.65, mean 0.28. These virtually identical results show that the multiple-choice items of the OHI can be replaced with the more compact single choice items of the OHQ without detriment. The observation that the maximum inter-item correlations within

Conclusions

The Oxford Happiness Inventory is a relatively lengthy measure of well-being constructed from 29 multiple choice items. A more compact instrument, the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire has been devised which consists of a similar number of similarly worded, single items that respondents may answer on a uniform six-point Likert scale. The latter scale, which contains roughly equal numbers of positive and negative items that can be intermingled with other items in the construction of personality

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