Positive mental health factors such as social wellbeing have been found to be protective against developing mental disorders such as depression. When adolescents have positive mental health they are more likely to thrive in areas such as academics and less likely to engage in risk taking behaviour. The secondary school environment presents an opportunity for interventions which aim to foster adolescents’ psychological wellbeing and resilience.

The Arch Lab recently contributed to a paper titled “Measurement Invariance of the Flourishing Scale among a Large Sample of Canadian Adolescents” which used a large sample of high school students across Canada from the COMPASS study to examine the psychometric properties of the Flourishing Scale (FS) within this population. Observed differences in FS scores among different subgroups were observed; however all together, the study found support for the validity of the FS among Canadian adolescent population in secondary schools.

Given the importance of psychological wellbeing to adolescent health and strong psychometric properties demonstrated by the FS, future youth-focused research should strongly consider incorporating the FS as a measure of youth wellbeing.