Measures of five aspects of affective well-being at work

Validation evidence is provided for scales that measure five aspects of affective well-being in relation to the work context: anxiety-comfort, depression-pleasure, bored-enthusiastic, tiredness-vigour and angry-placid. Confirmatory factor analysis is used to test four alternative structures for the items in the scales in two samples ( n = 871; mean age 42.8 yrs, n = 1915; modal age 46–50 yrs). Analyses in both samples support one structure. The final scales have acceptable internal reliability. The unique explanatory power of each scale is suggested by partial correlations with theoretically related variables. Confirmatory factor analysis indicates that the five factor solution has a better fit with the data than other first order solutions with fewer factors. Second order factor analysis shows that two superordinate factors, corresponding to negative and positive affect can account for the relationships amongst the five first order factors.