The Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS): a valid and reliable tool for measuring mental well-being in diverse populations and projects

WEMWBS was developed in 2007 to meet the need for a measure of mental well-being for use in surveys and evaluations of mental health promotion initiatives. It comprises 14 positively worded items relating only to positive attributes of mental health. In addition to offering rigour for research and evaluation, WEMWBS’ positive focus offers a developmental perspective, helping to orientate policy makers, programme participants and survey respondents towards mental wellbeing and enabling identification of protective and promoting factors. Initial evaluation on student and adult (16 yrs plus) population groups in the UK showed good content validity; confirmatory factor analysis supported the single factor hypothesis; Cronbach’s alpha suggested the possibility of some item redundancy; the distribution was near normal; there were no ceiling effects; test retest reliability was high and the scale discriminated population groups in a way which was consistent with results of other surveys. Subsequent evaluation demonstrated that a reduced 7 item scale (SWEMWBS) met the stringent measurement properties of a RASCH analysis. Since that time WEMWBS has been validated in young people (13-15 yrs) and in adult Pakistani and Chinese populations living in the UK. It has also been validated in Icelandic and Italian populations and is currently undergoing validation in further European countries (Spain, Germany, France, Portugal, Netherlands Belgium) and into Setswana (a South African native language) and Malay. Several of these validations have adopted a mixed methods approaches, including a qualitative as well as quantitative component. Quantitative evaluations so far suggest that the scale is robust in different population groups and cultures. Qualitative evaluation broadly supports these findings but also offers interesting insights into how mental wellbeing is viewed in across different groups. WEMWBS has been used in large scale national surveys as well as cohort and panel studies in the UK and in Iceland. Because of its focus on positive attributes, it has proved very popular for use in evaluation of a wide range of mental health promotion interventions where it has proved sensitive to change.