Madrid, Apr 25 (Efeverde) .- The Community Wellbeing Index (CWI), a tool created by the Carlos III Health Institute and the Higher Council for Scientific Research fifteen years ago, has managed to gain ground in other countries and has demonstrated its effectiveness in populations and contexts with linguistic, geographical, cultural and socio-economic diversity.
Researchers from the Carlos III Health Institute, in collaboration with groups of scientists from Australia and South Africa, have conducted a study to analyze the possible international use of the tool developed in Spain to calculate and analyze the welfare levels.
Community well -being is understood as the relationship between the objective conditions in which people and personal experiences of community life live, and their measurement allows to evaluate the quality of life, guide interventions and evaluate the impact of community policies and projects, the Carlos III Health Institute (ISCIII) reported.
The tool
In 2011, an ISCIII team led by researcher Maria Joao Forjaz, of the National Center for Epidemiology, developed together with researchers from the Center for Human and Social Sciences of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) Community Wellbeing Index (CWI), which is based on a brief questionnaire to measure community well -being from an individual perspective. In 2015 a review of the same article described that tool as an “excellent” measure.
South Africa and Australia research teams were interested in the tool and contacted the ISCIII, and jointly promoted a study to evaluate the psychometric properties of that tool In other languagesEnglish (Australia) The Setswana (South Africa).
The research has evaluated the validity and reliability of the CWI by adding data sets from two other countries to the original data set collected in Spain, and the results have supported this tool as a brief and easy to administer measure that evaluates the well -being and general satisfaction at the community level.
After publishing their results, the ISCIII researchers have explained that the CWI can have broad utility in populations and contexts with linguistic, geographical, cultural and socio -economic diversity.
In addition, the inclusion of this Spanish tool in other databases at the international level will allow the comparison of community well -being between different regions, the identification of inequalities and the ability to provide guidelines for making decisions in public policies. Efeverde
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