Abstract / Summary
Abstract The aim of this study is to develop and validate the Brief Happiness Scale (BHS) and to examine its measurement invariance across groups (i.e., gender, school, and academic achievement). Although the primary aim of the study is to develop the BHS, a parallel mediation model was also conducted to examine the roles of different belonging dimensions (e.g., friends, school, family, and community) in the association between psychological distress and happiness among adolescents. This cross-sectional study included two separate samples consisting of 665 adolescents from different secondary and high schools in Türkiye. Findings demonstrated a unidimensional structure of the measure, accounting for a large proportion of the variance in happiness and indicating excellent fit statistics, with strong factor loadings and internal reliability estimates. The measurement invariance results supported configural and metric invariance across gender, school level, and academic achievement groups, but scalar invariance was fully supported only across school achievement groups. Also, only partial support was found for scalar invariance across gender groups. Further mediation analyses offer a deeper insight into how psychological challenges influence happiness through adolescents' social interactions and environmental settings. School, family, and community belonging, specifically, significantly mediated the relationship between psychological distress and happiness. Overall, these findings suggest that improving adolescent well-being might involve strengthening their sense of belonging in family, school, and community settings.