The WOW Life Scale: Development and Validation of a Multidimensional Measure of Agentic Well-Being

Abstract

The pursuit of happiness necessitates tools that move beyond measuring static states of well-being to assessing the active, agentic processes through which individuals build a fulfilling life. Existing scales often describe how happy someone is, but not how they build their happiness. This study aimed to develop and validate the wheel of wonderful (WOW) life scale, a new instrument designed to measure six agentic pathways to well-being: time, achievement, meaning, work life flow, relationships, and context. The 12-item WOW Life scale was administered to a sample of (N=1015) individuals working in the pharmaceutical industry. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was done to identify the latent factor structure and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was then performed on the second to validate the identified structure. Reliability was assessed using Cronbach’s alpha and composite reliability (CR). Validity was evaluated through convergent and discriminant validity metrics.