RT Journal Article
T1 Promoting Mental Health in Adolescents Through Physical Education: Measuring Life Satisfaction for Comprehensive Development
A1 Gómez Paniagua, Santiago
A1 Castillo Paredes, Antonio
A1 Olivares Sánchez-Toledo, Pedro Rufino
A1 Rojo Ramos, Jorge
AB Background: Life satisfaction serves as a preventive agent against various emotional,cognitive, and behavioral challenges, making it a crucial cognitive indicator ofsubjective well-being, particularly during adolescence. Accurately assessing life satisfactionis essential for understanding and promoting adolescent mental health, especially inapplied settings such as physical education, which plays a key role in fostering psychologicalwell-being and positive youth development. However, additional investigationis needed to confirm the tools used for this purpose. This study aimed to analyze thepsychometric properties, metric invariance, and temporal stability of the Satisfaction withLife Scale (SWLS) in adolescents from a region in southeastern Spain. Thus, the presentstudy sought to answer the following research questions: (1) Does the SWLS demonstrateadequate psychometric properties in an adolescent population? (2) Is the SWLS invariantacross gender and residential environments? (3) Does the SWLS show adequate stabilityover time? Methods: A sample of 400 students was assessed using exploratory and confirmatoryfactor analyses, multigroup comparisons, and test–retest techniques. Results:The results showed significant differences in scale scores in the sex and demographiclocation variables. Also, a robust unifactorial model with five items demonstrated goodperformance in terms of goodness of fit and internal consistency. Furthermore, full metricinvariance was observed across genders, while configural invariance was supported forresidential environment. Concurrent validity analyses revealed significant associationswith another unidimensional well-being measure, and temporal stability was confirmedthrough the intraclass correlation coefficient. Conclusions: The findings support the SWLSas a potentially valid, reliable, and time-effective tool for assessing adolescent life satisfaction.Its strong psychometric properties make it highly suitable for use in mentalhealth research, longitudinal monitoring, and large-scale studies. Moreover, its ease ofadministration allows its integration into educational, clinical, community-based, andphysical education contexts, offering insightful information for the creation of long-lastingmental health regulations and preventive measures meant to improve the well-being ofadolescents. Notwithstanding these encouraging results, some restrictions must be noted.The sample was restricted to a single geographic area, and contextual or cultural factorsmay have an impact on how satisfied people are with their lives. Furthermore, responsebiases could have been introduced by using self-report measures
PB MDPI
SN 2227-9067 (electrónica)
YR 2025
FD 2025-05
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10272/25584
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10272/25584
LA eng
NO Gómez-Paniagua, S., Castillo-Paredes, A., Olivares, P. R., & Rojo-Ramos, J. (2025). Promoting Mental Health in Adolescents Through Physical Education: Measuring Life Satisfaction for Comprehensive Development. Children, 12(5), 658. https://doi.org/10.3390/children12050658
NO The APC was funded by the Open Access Program of the Universidad de Las Américas.
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Huelva
RD 31 may 2026