Adaptation of the PERMA well-being scale into Turkish: Validity and reliability studies

Seligman’s “well-being scale” PERMA evaluates people’s level of well-being in five dimensions: P: Positive and Negative emotions, E: Engagement, R: Relationships, M: Meaning, A: Accomplishment, N: Negative Emotion and H: Health.  This scale measures a person’s level of well being using five components. The measurement scale developed consists of 23 items with a scoring interval from 0 to 10. The  internal consistency coefficient of the scale is 0.82. The adaptation study of the PERMA well-being scale was applied on a group of university students. For language validity, some translation texts (from English to Turkish/from Turkish to English) were given to the students in the department of ELT and positive significant correlations where obtained from the English and Turkish forms (r=0.95, p<0.01; r=0.95, p<0.01). The measurement tool with 23 articles and 8 dimensions tested by confirmatory factor analysis was seen to have enough goodness of fit index (c2/sd=100.96/41, p=0.00, RMSEA=0.076, CFI=0.96, GFI=0.93, NNFI=0.94). As a result of the correlation analyses made for the criterion validity of PERMA well-being scale; a significant positive relation was found with subjective well-being scale and psychological well-being scale. The internal consistency coefficient of the scale was α=0.82 and test retest correlation was found at 0.81. As a result, the 23-item and eight-dimensional measuring tool became ready for use by the researchers.   Key words: Well-being, positive and negative emotions, occupation, relationships, meaning and success, well-being scale, reliability and validity.