📝 What is it?
The Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scales (WEMWBS) is a 14-item measure for mental wellbeing.
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It asks about both feeling and behavioral aspects of mental wellbeing over the last two weeks. It is positively worded and includes questions about optimism, feeling loved, confidence, and more.
It is most commonly used to measure the mental wellbeing of clients in clinical settings or populations in programs or research. It is widely used and can be found in over 25 languages.
📸 Sample screenshot:
😌 What is mental wellbeing?
Positive mental health, human flourishing, resilience, responding well to stress, thriving.
Many measures and mental health conditions focus on the "negative" aspect of functioning - disorders, deficits and diseases. Mental wellbeing refers to the "positive" part of mental health!
There are different ways to look at wellbeing. Two important areas are feelings (cheerfulness) and behaviors (dealing with problems well). The WEMWBS asks questions about both.
Mental wellbeing affects many other areas of a person's life including their physical health, relationships, and work.
It is important! And important to promote it!
📉 Scoring:
The WEMWBS contains 14 items scored on a 5-point Likert scale with values from 1 (None of the time) to 5 (All of the time). Total scores are summed and range from 14 to 70. Higher scores are associated with higher levels of mental wellbeing.
There are no validated cutoff scores but some clinicians and researchers find it useful to create their own "cutoffs" using the mean and standard deviation from the previous large studies on the WEMWBS.
The mean is typically around 51 and the standard deviation is typically around 9. One standard deviation from the mean in both directions would be 42 on the lower end and 60 on the upper end. So the "cutoffs" that many clinicians/researchers have used are:
Scores between 14-42 are "Below average" mental wellbeing
Scores between 42-60 are "Within normal limits" mental wellbeing
Scores between 60-70 are "Above average" mental wellbeing
🤯 If it has been a few years since your last Statistics class, no worries. Basically, one standard deviation away from the mean in both directions captures about 70% of the population as you can see in the normal distribution graph below. That means that about 70% of people will score between 42-60, about 15% of people will score less than 42, and about 15% of people will score greater than 60.
*FYI, the WEMWBS was developed in the UK so the studies, mean, and standard deviations mentioned refer to samples from the UK.
👍 Benefits:
Widely used and well validated in many different populations
Short and quick/easy to complete
It can be refreshing for clients to consider the "positive" side of mental health (wellbeing) and not just the "negative" side (disease, disorder).
💡 Best practices:
Many clinicians use it weekly and some use it biweekly. The cadence is entirely dependent upon what is best for the clinician and client. FYI, the WEMWBS intro does say "...over the last two weeks."
Keep an eye out for low scores as they are often indicative of mental illness, especially depression.
Clinicians can use individual questions as springboards into deeper conversations- "You scored high on X but low on Y. Tell me more about those that."
ℹ️ Summary: (old version minus spaces)
Focus Area: Mental wellbeing
Overview: Created in Scotland in 2006, The Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS) was developed to enable the measuring of mental wellbeing in the general population and the evaluation of projects, programs, and policies which aim to improve mental wellbeing. The items are all worded positively and cover both feeling and functioning aspects of mental wellbeing, thereby making the concept more accessible. The scale has been widely used nationally and internationally for monitoring, evaluating projects and programs and investigating the determinants of mental wellbeing.
Total number of items: 14
Standardized cadence: 2 weeks
Estimated completion time: 2-3 minutes
Supported subscales: none
Age range: 13+
Scoring and interpretation: Sum the scores. Higher scores are related to higher levels of mental wellbeing. There are no validated cutoff scores.
Reliability/Validity: WEMWBS showed good content validity. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the single factor hypothesis. A Cronbach's alpha score of 0.89 (student sample) and 0.91 (population sample) suggests some item redundancy in the scale. WEMWBS showed high correlations with other mental health and well-being scales and lower correlations with scales measuring overall health. Its distribution was near normal and the scale did not show ceiling effects in a population sample. It discriminated between population groups in a way that is largely consistent with the results of other population surveys. Test-retest reliability at one week was high (0.83). Social desirability bias was lower or similar to that of other comparable scales.
Original paper: https://hqlo.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1477-7525-5-63
Reference: Tennant, R., Hiller, L., Fishwick, R. et al. The Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS): development and UK validation. Health Qual Life Outcomes 5, 63 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1186/1477-7525-5-63
Additional information: User Manual: http://www.mentalhealthpromotion.net/resources/user-guide.pdf