br Conflict of interest br Acknowledgements The HBSC is

Conflict of interest
Acknowledgements The HBSC is a WHO/Euro collaborative study; International Coordinator of the 2014 study was Candace Currie, St. Andrews University, Scotland; Data Bank Manager is Oddrun Samdal, University of Bergen, Norway. The 6 countries involved in this analysis (current responsible principal investigator) were: Canada (J. Freeman), Czech Republic (M. Kalman), Israel (Y. Harel-Fisch), Poland (J. Mazur), the United Kingdom (England (A. Morgan), Scotland (C. Currie). Funding for this research came from research grants in the following agencies: (1) the Public Health Agency of Canada; (2) the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (Operating grant MOP 341188); (3) the Czech Science Foundation (Reg. no. GA14-02804S); (4) the Department of Health for England; (5) the Israeli Ministry of Health; (6) the Institute of Mother and Child in Warsaw, Poland; and (7) NHS Health Scotland.
Over the last three decades, rapidly increasing interest has been shown, and a great growth has occurred in publications and new journals, related to assessing spiritual health and well-being. Most attention has been paid to university students (many of whom participate in research projects to gain credit points) and adults, many of whom have been in poor states of health. However, assessment of spiritual health of younger adolescents has received less attention, with pertinent publications in journals such as the International Journal of Children׳s Spirituality (), other journals () and books (), and some unpublished works (). The relative paucity of research with youth could be due to increased ethical demands of gaining parental permission and that of school systems and staff, as well as that from young people themselves. Developing instruments with language that is appropriate for young people has also provided a challenge. Spiritual well-being is a complex concept. Building on growing interest in health and the influence of positive psychology, an initial working definition of ‘spiritual well-being’ was made, in the United States by the National Interfaith Coalition on Aging, as ‘the affirmation of life in a relationship with God, self, GDC-0879 and environment that nurtures and celebrates wholeness’ (). Subsequent studies have expanded on this framework definition to investigate more fully the four sets of relationships that are seen to comprise spiritual well-being (). A sound theoretical framework is needed upon which to build any measure, especially one in such an elusive field as spiritual well-being (). The Four Domains Model of Spiritual Health/Well-Being () was used as the basis for developing a 20-item Spiritual Health And Life-Orientation Measure (SHALOM), followed by a generic version of SHALOM for particular use with non-religious groups (), and an alternative Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire (SWBQ2) for youth (), as well as an appropriate measure for primary school children, called ‘Feeling Good, Living Life’ (). A review of 260 measures of spirituality and well-being revealed that 78 of them contained any items, with only 31 containing more than two items, in each of the four factors used to assess spiritual health/well-being (). Only six instruments, developed by this author, contained an equal number of items per factor, so as not to be seen to privilege any one domain of spiritual well-being over the others, by assessing Microtubules with more items. The most popular of these instruments is SHALOM, which has been sought for use in hundreds of studies in 29 languages. SHALOM is considered to be a viable ‘spiritual thermometer.’ With only five items per domain, it cannot be considered an exhaustive measure of spiritual well-being, but it is a comprehensive measure shown to relate significantly with personality, happiness, gender, and religiosity (). As well as use with students, SHALOM has been used in a wide range of studies in business, counselling, health (nursing and medicine), psychology and religiosity (. The lived experience sector of SHALOM, called the SWBQ, was shown to have good reliability, with Cronbach׳s alpha, composite reliability and variance extracted. The SWBQ also showed good construct, concurrent, discriminant and predictive validity, and also revealed factorial independence from personality (). Subsequent analyses showed ‘general support for the psychometric properties of the SWBQ from an Item Response Theory perspective’ ().