Measuring women's psychological well-being in Indonesia

This paper describes the development of a set of measures of women's psychological well-being in Indonesia, identifies meaningful clusters of women based on the well-being measures, and explores the sociodemographic factors associated with these well-being clusters. This is the first published study to measure psychological well-being among a large sample of Indonesians and the first to focus on women in that country. Rather than use standard measures of psychological well-being developed in Western nations and untested among Asian women, focus groups were conducted to develop an understanding of Indonesian women's perceptions of their own well-being. The focus group findings were used to develop 41 questionnaire items to measure psychological well-being, and the questionnaire was administered to 796 women in Sumatra and Lampung. Factor analysis reduced the well-being variables into five factors accounting for 45% of the total variance: (1) general negative feelings; (2) satisfaction with relationships and ability to control fertility; (3) satisfaction with economic, family and personal conditions; (4) negative feelings regarding marital and domestic issues; and (5) ability to pursue activities outside the home. We constructed five scales based on these factors. Based on their scores on these scales, women grouped into three clusters differentiated by their scores on four of the five scales. Low levels of psychological well-being were associated in bivariate analyses with: (1) rural residence; (2) young age (under age 30); (3) marriage before age 20; (4) low socioeconomic status; and (5) lower educational attainment.