In plain language
Trying to force yourself to feel happier often backfires. A more reliable route to well-being is to change what you actually do. Therapies like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) work by helping people engage in behaviours that matter to them, but until recently there were few questionnaires that comprehensively measured both what those behaviours are and why people do them. This book chapter presents the Six Ways to Well-Being questionnaire (6W-WeB), a measure developed by the authors to fill that gap.
The 6W-WeB assesses how satisfied people are with how often they engage in six behaviours linked by research to well-being: connecting with others, challenging themselves, giving to others, engaging in physical activity, embracing the moment, and caring for themselves. Crucially, it also measures motivation, distinguishing autonomous reasons (doing something because it is important and interesting to you) from controlled reasons (doing it out of pressure or guilt). The chapter reviews the measure’s validation across four independent samples from two countries, with participants aged 11 to 65.
The measure showed a robust factor structure that held up across gender, age, country, and levels of psychological distress, and it related in expected ways to flourishing, distress, experiential avoidance, and nonattachment. People who met criteria for high psychological distress engaged less in the six behaviours, saw their activities as less important, and felt more pressure around them. The chapter also provides the full questionnaire and scoring instructions, making the 6W-WeB a practical tool for clinicians and researchers who want to pinpoint which behaviour domains can promote value-consistent living.
Key findings
- The 6W-WeB measures satisfaction with the frequency of six well-being behaviours — connecting, challenging oneself, giving, physical activity, embracing the moment, and self-care — plus autonomous and controlled motivation for each.
- It was validated in four independent samples from two countries, with participants ranging in age from 11 to 65 years.
- A bifactor model best represented the data and was invariant across gender, age, country of sampling, and levels of psychological distress.
- Scores related as predicted to flourishing, psychological distress, experiential avoidance, and nonattachment.
- People meeting criteria for high psychological distress showed significantly lower behaviour engagement and activity importance, higher activity pressure, and lower scores across all six behaviour domains.
- The chapter includes the complete questionnaire and scoring instructions, which are free to use under a Creative Commons licence.
How to cite
APA
Basarkod, G., Ciarrochi, J., & Sahdra, B. (2023). Six Ways to Well-Being (6W-WeB). In O. N. Medvedev, C. U. Krägeloh, R. J. Siegert, & N. N. Singh (Eds.), Handbook of Assessment in Mindfulness Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77644-2_67-2
BibTeX
@incollection{basarkod2023six,
author = {Basarkod, Geetanjali and Ciarrochi, Joseph and Sahdra, Baljinder},
title = {Six Ways to Well-Being (6W-WeB)},
booktitle = {Handbook of Assessment in Mindfulness Research},
editor = {Medvedev, Oleg N. and Kr{\"a}geloh, Christian U. and Siegert, Richard J. and Singh, Nirbhay N.},
publisher = {Springer, Cham},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-77644-2_67-2}
}
Related work
- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
- Process-Based Therapy & Idionomic Analysis
- Nonattachment research & practices (non-attachment.com)
Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version via the DOI above.