Janette Boazman

Personal Well-Being of Gifted Students Following Participation in an Early College-Entrance Program.

In this study, life satisfaction and its correlates were explored through analysis of the experiences and psychological traits of highly gifted students who were accelerated into an early college-entrance program. Happiness, fulfillment in life, assuredness, and good dispositions are constructs that point toward positive character development and thriving. These early college entrants expressed greater global satisfaction with their lives than age peers. They specifically reported elevated levels of satisfaction in their achievements, immediate standard of living, personal safety, and future security than age peers. They expressed powerful feelings of general self-efficacy and high levels of trait seriousness, two constructs related to facilitating success. The findings in this study suggest these early college entrants are on a path toward personal thriving and living a good life.

Subjective Well-Being of Gifted American College Students An Examination of Psychometric Properties of the PWI-A

This study examined the psychometric properties of the Personal Well-being Index for Adults (PWI-A), a measure of subjective well-being. The study used data from 533 high-ability American college students: honors students and participants in an early college entrance program. In earlier studies using the PWI-A, the instrument appeared to show differences in disaggregated aspects of well-being for these gifted college students. Unfortunately, the careful psychometric examination of the instrument done in this study showed that the PWI-A, as it currently is constituted, did not perform as hoped for assessing changes in the disaggregated aspects of well-being among groups of gifted college students. The single-factor structure of PWI-A showed support for convergent validity, but error correlations indicated lack of support for discriminant validity. The current analysis of the PWI-A scores showed good internal consistency, but the instrument lacked measurement invariance across honors and early entrance students. Four of the seven items exhibited differential item functioning across the two groups. The lack of full measurement invariance indicated room for refinement of the instrument as applied to measuring the well-being of high-ability college students. The results of the current study suggest that to measure accurately the disaggregated well-being of gifted and talented young people, a new, revised, or expanded instrument is necessary. More and diverse items per subscale in a new or revised instrument would allow a more accurate assessment of the specific aspects of the well-being of gifted and talented individuals.