Satisfacción escolar y bienestar subjetivo en la adolescencia: Poniendo a prueba indicadores para su medición comparativa en Brasil, Chile y España

This paper studies the inter-linguistic and intercultural comparability of subjective well- being during adolescence, as well as school satisfaction as a component of this well-being, using samples of 12 to 16-year-old from Brazil (n=1588), Chile (n=843) and Spain (n=2900). As subjective well-being indicators, two versions of the PWI (Cummins, Eckersley, van Pallant, Vugt, and Misajon, 2003) were adopted, one measuring well-being with different life domains, a single-item scale on overall life satisfaction (OLS). The six items on satisfaction with different facets of the school life, used by Casas et al. (2013), were included as subjective indicators of school satisfaction. The original version of the PWI (PWI7) and a longer version with 10 items (PWI10) are used. Both versions show a good fit in Confirmatory Factor Analysis using the pooled sample. Using multiple regressions analysis and Structural Equations Modelling (SEM), different options are considered and analyzed in order to estimate the most appropriate model to compare subjective well- being cross-countries, with school satisfaction included. An analysis of the results indicates that two multi-group SEM, which include the six items on satisfaction with different facets of school life related to a latent variable, and also related to latent variables PWI7 and PWI10, respectively, show good comparability between countries. Multiple regression analysis suggests that the most useful synthetic indicator on satisfaction with school life is satisfaction with your life as student. When this item is included in PWI7 or PWI10, internal consistency of each of the scales (PWI8 and PWI11) improves, and the respective multi-group SEM of these two psychometric scales show that variances, covariances and regressions are comparable between the three studied countries. This was not the case with the overall mean indices, which is probably due to the different answering styles of adolescents in each country.