Work and Leisure

Work, leisure and well-being 173tend to correlate with pleasant emotions, whereas neuroticism and negativelife events covary more strongly with negative emotions. He also recognisesthat subjective well-being is not a sufficient condition for mental health. It isrecognised that well-being may have many components, and that what weview as important may be culturally determined. In his concept of mentalhealth from a Western perspective, Warr (1987) advocates the measurementof affective well-being, competence, autonomy, aspiration and integratedfunctioning. However, it is the measure of affective well-being (outlinedlater), which has received the greatest empirical attention by Warr andcolleagues.When people are asked about their psychological well-being they typicallyrefer to two types of evaluations. One is concerned with affective states suchas the degree to which they experience feelings that are pleasant. The other isrelated to cognitive states such as satisfaction (Argyle 1987). In a review ofsubjective well-being, Diener (2000) notes that early research usually relied ononly single self report items, whereas recent measures often contain multipleitems. Bradburn (1969) developed a single item measure of happiness whichasked ‘Taking all things together, how would you say things are these days –would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy or not too happy?’Andrews and Withey (1974) asked respondents ‘How do you feel about yourlife as a whole?’ Respondents were provided with a seven-point response scaleranging from delighted to terrible. Single item measures of well-being areuseful and still used today. They allow a person to make a general judgementabout a particular facet of their well-being. It is recognised, however, that it isalso useful to assess emotions and satisfaction by questions which tap anumber of related aspects.A life satisfaction scale developed by Warr et al. (1979) includes elevenitems which refer to different aspects of the respondents’ everyday life andtheir environment. The sum of the scores to the eleven items constitutes ameasure of an individual’s total life satisfaction. A twelfth and final item onthe scales asks respondents to rate their life as a whole at the present moment.All items in the life satisfaction scale are answered using seven-point scales,ranging from extremely dissatisfied (1) to extremely satisfied (7).Warr (1987, 1990) has devised a series of scales to measure affective wellbeingon three principal axis: the ‘pleasure axis’ (measuring displeasure topleasure) the ‘anxiety–contentment’ axis and the ‘depression–enthusiasm’axis. The scales can be administered to measure affective well-being in work orin leisure. The pleasure axis contains single item measures of enjoyment, satisfactionand happiness, with answers ranging in five stages from e.g. (5) I couldnot be happier to (1) I am not at all happy. This measure is similar to the oneused by Bradburn (1969). Warr terms these ‘narrow band’ measures in thatthey index pleasure without specific reference to level of arousal. The othertwo axes are ‘broad band’ measures, which measure pleasure from negative topositive and include level of arousal. They are based on more sophisticated