Joy Care: Development and Standardization of a Scale of Psychological Well-being

This paper presents the process of standardisation of Joy Care, a newly developed scale of psychological wellbeing, which builds upon ideas put forward by Ryff (1989); Diener, Robert, Emmons, Larsen, and Griffin (1985); and Watson, Clarke, and Tullegen (1988) among others. To address the need for valid and reliable assessment that helps gauge psychological health, Joy-care was developed for the Indian population. While the scale is not a diagnostic tool, it aims to address gaps in data on mental well-being in the Indian context, and thus integrally supports the preventive model of health. The five domains being evaluated include: perception of self, relational well-being, emotional experience, perceived personal growth, life outlook, each producing a score from 1 to 5. The assessment has 98 items, is easily administered, accessible and available on Wellness Mandala's proprietary virtual platform. It requires the least amount of time and effort on the mental health professional's part, yet aims to provide in-depth insights that can guide the direction of psychotherapeutic interventions. The tool was developed and standardised, using a sample of 522 individuals, with appropriate psychometric properties, for the working Indian population, aged between 23 to 65 years. The scale was found to be highly internally consistent, with Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.948. Two distinct categories for norms were created based on age, i.e., those 32 and below and those 33 and above. Joy-care is a standardised, reliable and valid measure of psychological well-being developed for the Indian population that can be a valuable addition to the mental health community's efforts to support psychological well-being.