2134/21585 Ylenio Longo Ylenio Longo Iain Coyne Iain Coyne Stephen Joseph Stephen Joseph Petter Gustavsson Petter Gustavsson Support for a general factor of well-being Loughborough University 2016 Structure of well-being Flourishing Factor analysis Unidimensionality Positive feeling Positive functioning Hedonic well-being Eudaimonic well-being Business and Management not elsewhere classified 2016-06-10 10:34:34 Journal contribution https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/journal_contribution/Support_for_a_general_factor_of_well-being/9502286 Well-being is typically defined as positive feeling (e.g. happiness), positive functioning (e.g. competence, meaning) or a combination of the two. Recent evidence indicates that well-being indicators belonging to different categories can be explained by single "general" factor of well-being (e.g. Jovanović, 2015). We further test this hypothesis using a recent well-being scale, which includes indicators of positive feeling and positive functioning (Huppert & So, 2013). While the authors of the scale originally identified a two-factor structure, in view of recent evidence, we hypothesize that the two-factor solution may be due to a method effect of different items being measured with different rating scales. In study 1, we use data from the European Social Survey round 3 (n = 41,461) and find that two factors have poor discriminant validity and, after using a bifactor model to account for different rating scales, only the general factor is reliable. In study 2, we eliminate method effects by using the same rating scale across items, recruit a new sample (n = 507), and find that a one-factor model fits the data well. The results support the hypothesis that well-being indicators, typically categorized as "positive feeling" and "positive functioning," reflect a single general factor.