Scoping literature review of well‐being of students at school: Implications for designing evidence‐based interventions

Abstract

This paper reviews the literature to clarify the image of a student with a high level of well‐being (WB) for a future systematic literature review and evidence‐based interventions to promote student WB. It presents a holistic approach to the analysis of definitions, operationalisation and indicators with interpretative phenomenological analyses (IPA). The main question of the paper is what image of student WB can be constructed from the components and indicators of WB that have been highlighted in the literature. Overall, 50 publications were coded before the subjectively evaluated saturation was reached and 641 mentions of the different components of WB were coded that were distributed among seven categories: ‘individual psychological indicators’ (319 units), ‘social contacts, relationships’ (136 units), ‘health’ (78 units), ‘school life’ (63 units), ‘standard of living’ (26 units), ‘spirituality, moral competence, values’ (12 units) and ‘general mentions’ of WB (7 units). It is argued that individual psychological state, quality of relationships, health, school‐related features, objective indicators, and moral and spiritual aspects are features of students with a high level of WB. The implications for further research, practical usage and the limitations of the study are offered in the Discussion section.Developing high levels of student WB is an important aim of schools, but for it to be something more than just a declaration, some measures should be taken. To be effective, such measures should be based on scientific knowledge. This paper reviews the literature for future practical application.The research field of WB is diverse. Mostly, for evidence‐based measures, one specific approach to WB is used. This paper argues that it is important to look holistically at all theories of WB as they present different facets of one holistic construct.This paper will be useful for practitioners and policy makers as it provides both a scientific section where data, methods and results are presented, and an interpretation of the information for practical usage. It provides a wide range of data and covers several theories of WB and the operationalisation of WB and shows from which indexes these theories and operationalisations originate and why.