Two articles explicitly conceptualised wellbeing more broadly as: “…identified through a combination of wellbeing (i.e. life-satisfaction and self-esteem) and lack of psychological distress (i.e. depressive symptoms and emotional exhaustion)” (Duineveld et al., 2017, p.6) and “the term wellbeing is sometimes used interchangeably with happiness and represents a positive effect, absence or negative effect, and cognitive judgement of satisfaction with life as a whole” (Wolters et al., 2012, p.464). These definitions strongly define wellbeing in that they focus on both positive and negative effects and use a balanced discourse, but they did not define emotional wellbeing. Only one article explicitly conceptualised emotional wellbeing as “perceived stress and the experience of positive and negative affect” (Galla et al., 2020, p.350). However, one could argue that as 57 articles did not define wellbeing and only one article explicitly conceptualised emotional wellbeing, that wellbeing is an inherently ambiguous and ‘hard-to-define’ concept. However, this could be an indication of a lack of operationalization of key concepts in primary-secondary transitions research articles in general.

This explicit conceptualisation of emotional wellbeing in a clear and unambiguous way in Galla et al.’s (2020) article provides clarity and confidence in their findings. Galla et al. (2020) also clearly outlined how emotional wellbeing was operationalised in their research study: “emotional wellbeing (operationalised here as perceived stress and the experience of positive and negative affect)” (Galla et al., 2020, p.350), which is in line with their conceptualisation. This matching of conceptualisation and operationalisation was also the case for Duineveld et al. (2017) and Wolters et al. (2012), despite their broader focus on wellbeing, reinforcing the importance of explicitly discussing pathways and mechanisms being investigated within studies.

From a further seven articles, we could thematically deduct their implicit conceptualisation of emotional wellbeing, namely 1. the presence or absence of psychological symptoms, such as stress, depression and anxiety; 2. focus on feelings, affective experience and emotional states, and 3. synonymous with quality of life and responsive to changes in mood and life events (see Table 3).

Subsequently, 50 articles did not include explicit conceptualisation of wellbeing/emotional wellbeing and we could not deduct their implicit conceptualisation. For 29 of these articles, where reference was made to the construct emotional wellbeing, we looked at the context in which emotional wellbeing was used, as listed below. These included, primary-secondary transitions:

As can be seen, it was common for discussion pertaining to emotional wellbeing in the context of primary-secondary school transitions to be negative, i.e., deterioration due to transitions.

Twenty seven articles measured transitions experiences, of which 11 solely measured transitions experiences and 16 articles measured transitions experiences and emotional wellbeing. This suggests that it is more common for researchers to use measures of general emotional wellbeing, specific aspects of emotional wellbeing (e.g. anxiety symptoms and/or depressive symptoms/low mood) and/or broader factors associated with emotional wellbeing (coping/resilience, self-concept, attitudes towards school and/or loneliness), as opposed to measuring transitions experiences. This is a limitation because, without measuring transitions experiences, the authors could not measure the relationship between transitions experiences and general emotional wellbeing and/or specific aspects of emotional wellbeing and/or broader factors associated with emotional wellbeing. We speculate that one reason for this may be that some articles operationalised transitions in terms of change, move, or a time point, and did not assess actual transitions experiences of children. In other words, studies may have measured changes in emotional wellbeing between two time points which happened to be pre- and post-move to secondary school rather than assessing the influence of transitions as a process of adaptation over time. This limits the generalisability and implications of these findings to primary-secondary school transitions research and practice.

We noted above that only 11 articles solely measured transitions experiences. It is worth noting nonetheless that within transitions experiences scales, most studies did include an item relating to children’s emotional wellbeing. For example, Evangelou et al. (2008), included the item: How do you feel now that you have spent a term at your secondary school? (excited; happy; nervous; both excited and nervous; worried; other [please write here]) in their primary-secondary school transitions questionnaire; Foley et al. (2016) used the item: how are you feeling about the move to secondary school? (1 = not worried and 10 = very worried) in the transition survey created by them.

Amongst those 11 articles which solely measured transitions experiences, seven articles adapted already established scales such as the The Impending Transition to Secondary School Perceived as a Challenge and Threat (ITCT) measure (3 articles) and Perceptions of Transition Survey (3 articles), which include items about what children are looking forward to and worried about relating to secondary school.

As shown in Table 6, it is clear that for measures of emotional wellbeing and broader factors associated with wellbeing, most articles use existing measures that have already been applied in real-world settings. This is a strength of these articles, enabling clarity and comparability of research findings. For transitions experiences, anxiety symptoms and attitudes towards school only, authors have created measures. For attitudes towards school, only one article (Symonds & Hargreaves, 2016) has created a measure and it is worth noting that this article does not use any other measures within the other six emotional wellbeing categories, which suggests that the 24-item school perceptions measure developed fits the article’s clear purpose in assessing children’s feelings towards school.

However, significantly more articles within transitions experiences have created a measure (10/27 articles) or adapted measures (10/27 articles). This suggests that majority of researchers’ have felt the need to create or adapt pre-existing scales, as opposed to using pre-existing measures, which contrasts with the trend shown in the seven emotional wellbeing categories which have mainly used pre-existing measures. This identifies a gap in the literature, with the need to develop a more up-to-date measure; this is highlighted by the seven articles within the systematic review that all used Thomasson et al.’s (2006) pre-existing School Concerns Questionnaire (SCQ). Very recently one article within our review (Rice et al., 2021) adapted this scale to include three additional items (losing old friends, discipline and detentions, getting lost) reflecting the three most frequently reported additional concerns described by children in previous research (Rice et al., 2011).

For the remaining eight articles that adapted a measure, three articles adapted Sirsch’s (2003) ITCT scale and six articles adapted Akos’ (2002) School Transition Questionnaire. Reasons for adaptation included removing items that were shown to be unreliable within reliability analyses (Mackenzie et al., 2012) or to reduce the number of items for children to respond to (Waters et al., 2014b). Other reasons included using just one sub-scale to avoid overlap with other items (Bagnall et al., 2021a) or adapting the wording of items to allow for the exploration of both positive and negative aspects of school transition experience (Lovette-Wilsona et al., 2020). This, again, indicates a limitation of up-to-date measures within the field, especially given that these two scales were developed in the early 2000s, and highlights the need to develop a more up-to-date (reflecting more contemporary conceptualisations of transitions, e.g. MMT) and balanced measure in terms of reflecting positive as well as negative discourse.

For the 10 articles within the category transitions experiences that developed a measure, four articles exclusively used this measure and did not include measures in the other seven emotional wellbeing categories. Amongst the created scales, items mainly related to transitions concerns; relating to school and peer concerns (West et al., 2010), academic and personal concerns (Madjar & Chohat, 2017), in addition to general worries. For example, it was common for developed measures to ask children to express their level of worry e.g. item eight in Foley et al.’s (2016) article: “in your opinion how worried did you feel about the move to secondary school?” which was rated on a four point scale from not worried to extremely worried, and Wentzela et al.’s (2019) article that asked children to write down four things that they are thinking about or that concern them about the transition to high school, which were referred to as “anticipated concerns.”

This negative discourse situating school transitions as a hostile and adverse experience is not uncommon with transitions literature (Jindal-Snape et al., 2021), and may reflect empirical findings that commonly show short-term declines in children’s emotional wellbeing over school transitions. However, this is a limitation of these articles, especially when considering that this negative discourse is shown to frame research designs through the measures used within studies. This is not only likely to bias study findings, leading to demand characteristics, socially desirable answers and negative self-fulfilling prophecies, but may also have adverse negative impacts on participating children causing them to negatively question their feelings towards school transitions and potentially plant anxieties they may not have had. Thus, there is a need to shift this discourse, especially given that children’s faith in their coping skills and self- identity is shown to decrease over primary-secondary school transitions (Symonds, 2015) and use more positive items within measures, such as Bailey and Baines’ (2012) My feelings about school questionnaire that uses positive items to assess children’s self-reports of school adjustment. This is especially relevant given the mixed evidence pertaining to using reverse scoring within measures, which may on one hand avoid acquiescence, but can also lead to confusion especially if the opposite of a construct reverse-scored is fundamentally different than the construct (Morgado et al., 2017), e.g. worry and happy.

For six articles within transitions experiences that developed a measure, these articles also used another measure within an emotional wellbeing category (the most common second category being general emotional wellbeing) and one article (West et al., 2010) used another two measures within another two categories. This suggests that measures that have been designed by authors to assess transitions experiences have not also included items to assess children’s emotional wellbeing. For example, West et al. (2010) created a survey to assess children’s preparedness for secondary school, transitions experiences and pre-secondary experiences within the category transition experience, but also used a specific measure of emotional wellbeing by assessing depression symptoms using Kandel and Davies (1982) Depression Scale and a broader factor associated with emotional wellbeing using the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale Rosenberg (1965). Similarly, Bailey and Baines (2012) developed the My Feelings About School questionnaire to assess transitions adjustment, but also assessed children’s resilience using Prince-Embury’s (2006) Resiliency Scales for Children and Adolescents. This is acknowledged as a limitation within transitions literature, given the extensive time children are often required to complete measures, as to date we do not have a single measure to adequately operationalise emotional wellbeing in the context of school transitions.

For transitions experiences, the majority of articles have included a measure that has been implemented in the same country in which it was developed. Compared to the emotional wellbeing categories this is the highest match and through further examination it is clear that most of these measures were implemented and developed within the UK (n = 14), specifically assessing primary-secondary school transitions experiences. Due to the role of educational systems and cultural factors that have been shown in school transitions research (Jindal-Snape et al., 2019), developing and implementing measures in the same country enables researchers to specifically design and implement items focussed on children’s experiences relating to specific school transitions. For example, Evaneglou et al.’s (2008) created three scales to assess children’s adjustment over primary-secondary school transitions, and included items specifically relating to open days in the UK, e.g. “If you went to your new school’s open day/evening, what did you do there?” Response options included: listened to the Headteacher’s talk, met Headteacher, met other teachers, met other children, saw classes working, had demonstration lesson(s), had a tour, was free to wander around, which specifically relate to the culture around primary-secondary school transitions. These questions might not be relevant in other educational systems, and in some cases, even within the same country when education is evolved.

Moreover, Neal et al.’s (2016) Transition Strategy Questionnaire included items specifically relating to Year 6 in the UK, e.g. item eight: “Change your timetable in Year 6 so that it was more like your timetable at secondary school?” and item nine: “Give you extra responsibilities in Year 6 (e.g. becoming a monitor)?”. These items again specifically relate to primary-secondary school transitions in the UK and can improve the readability and accessibility of measures by using items that are as simple as possible, express a single idea and use common words that reflect the vocabulary level of the target population. For example, amongst the 11 measures that were designed and implemented in the same country to assess transition experience, the most common scale was the SCQ developed by Thomasson et al. (2006) in the UK, where all the articles using this scale also conducted their research within the UK. Instead, other countries assessing other school transitions, such as the transition to Middle school or High school in the USA used Smith et al.’s (2008) The Perceptions of Transition Survey or the Student Perception survey (Akos & Galassi, 2004)- which was based on Akos’ (2002) School Transition Questionnaire. Nonetheless, the lack of cross-cultural and diverse regional perspectives undermines the generalisability of the measures to explore school transitions and emotional wellbeing across diverse groups of children and regions.

It is also important to consider translation of survey items, because, even when rigorous translation procedures are implemented, it can be very difficult to generate equivalent items across languages (Davidov & De Beuckelaer, 2010) as language is often correlated with characteristics such as ethnicity, religion, or class, meaning an ethnic or class inference could lead to non-equivalence and bias inferences. Three studies within the category general emotional wellbeing assessed quality of life using the KIDSCREEN survey (Ravens-Sieberer et al., 2007). This is a survey that was originally developed in English and then translated to be used in: Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, France, The Netherlands, Australia, and the USA. In order to implement a measure in another country effectively, items must not only be (double) translated into different languages, but also need to be adapted culturally to maintain the content validity of the instrument. Beaton et al. (2000) provides an overview of the process of cross-cultural adaptation.

The lowest average number of items used within measures was nine (within the category attitudes towards school) and the greatest 35 items (within the categories general emotional wellbeing and coping/resilience). Given that all measures were designed to assess children’s transitions experiences or emotional wellbeing, this is a significantly large range; it is worth noting that there was vast heterogeneity across and between categories in terms of number of items within measures as reflected in the standard deviation scores. For example, one study (Waters et al., 2012) within the category transitions experiences adapted a measure to include just one item from the School Transition Questionnaire (Akos, 2002), whereas within this same category one article (Foley et al., 2016) designed the Transition survey, which contained 32 items. However, it is worth noting that Foley et al. (2016) did not use any other measures across emotional wellbeing categories and instead used this measure to examine affective concerns and preparations relating to school transitions.

Nonetheless, the number of items used within measures have the potential to influence the psychometric properties, namely validity and reliability of the measure, and the quality of the data (Bell, 2007). On one hand, too many scale items have the potential to cause confusion, especially if more than one item is used to assess the same construct (which in turn questions the measures construct validity), boredom and cognitive overload (Bell, 2007). For example, the largest measure included within the present systematic review contained 186 items, which was The Behavior Assessment System for Children: Second Edition (BASC-2), used within Martinez et al.’s (2011) research. It is worth noting that this scale requires children to rate 186 statements on a dichotomous true/false basis, pertaining to their personal thoughts and feelings relating to school problems, internalising problems, externalising problems and personal adjustment. Dichotomous scales can limit an individuals’ ability to express uncertainty or varying degrees of a characteristic, and forces individuals to state that something is or is not present. Given that this measure was included within the broader category general aspects of emotional wellbeing, the significantly large number of items may also reflect the difficulty defining, conceptualising and operationalising the concept emotional wellbeing.

Very short scales can also compromise the reliability of measures (Raykov, 2008), specifically the Cronbach’s alpha if too many items are removed. This is likely to be the case for the studies that used less than three items for a measure such as Waters et al. (2012) who used one item from the School Transition Questionnaire (Akos, 2002), Wentzela et al. (2019) who used the three item wellbeing subscale of the Weinberger Adjustment Inventory: Short Form (Weinberger, 1997) and Witherspoon et al. (2011) who used three items from the School Belonging measure (Battistich & Hom, 1997). In this context, future researchers should prioritize scales with enough items to keep the alpha within the acceptable range.

When also considering the number of items within a measure, it is also important to consider the response format because this can also affect the accessibility of measures. Generally, an introductory paragraph at the start of measures can increase response rate (Hox & Borgers, 2001) as can response scales that are not ambiguous. Many researchers argue that it is recommended to use four or five scale points when sampling children (Hox et al., 2001), although there is debate pertaining to the use of mid-points within survey items. This was shown in the present systematic review with majority of pre-existing and adapted scales using four to five response categories and an introductory paragraph, such as the Coping Efficacy Scale (Sandler et al., 2000) which was used in Bagnall et al.’s (2021a) study.

Across transitions experiences and emotional wellbeing categories, most studies used measures that are age-appropriate, in other words use a measure within their study that was designed for the same age group as the sample in the study. In fact, for transitions experiences, self-concept and loneliness there is 100% congruity in articles. This is a strength of the articles within this review, as when samples differ from the measure target population, validity and reliability of the measure can be reduced as score comparisons are not with demographically similar individuals.

However, some of the measures within the present review were not congruent. For example, one article (Galla et al., 2020) within the category general emotional wellbeing used a scale that was designed initially for university students; Scale of Positive and Negative Experience (Diener et al., 2010). Two articles within the category anxiety symptoms and depressive symptoms/low mood (Waters et al., 2012; Lester et al., 2013) used the scale Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995) to assess both constructs, which had initially been designed for university students. Within the category depressive symptoms/low mood, Duieveld et al. (2017) also used the DEPS depression scale (Salokangas et al., 1995) which had initially been designed for adults. For, coping/resilience, The Mental Toughness Questionnaire (Clough et al., 2002) which was designed for adults was used in one study (St Claire-Thompson et al., 2017) and for attitudes towards school the Need Satisfaction in the Workplace Questionnaire (Kasser et al., 1992) which was designed for adults was adapted in another study (Gillison et al., 2008).

Using the same measure, across age ranges, with appropriate adaptation to consider readability, attention, and children’s cognitive capability of answering questions, can be advantageous in allowing comparisons between groups and over time. However, without sufficient validation, to consider how adults’ models of emotional wellbeing and measures of the structure of affect can be applied to childhood, this is likely to influence the validity of the measure.

For a scale to be considered reliable, Cronbach’s alpha values of .70 or above are recommended, as a minimum internal consistency score (Nunnally & Bernstein, 1994) and was used as a criterion for reliability in this systematic review, recognising that it is the most commonly used measure of internal consistency (McCrae et al., 2011). However, recognising the longitudinal nature of primary-secondary school transitions, test-retest reliability, which addresses consistency across time, was another criterion. This, allows the assessment of a measure’s predictive validity over time enabling a deeper understanding of the construct of interest, and in fact combining the two indices has been recommended to holistically evaluate reliability (Schmidt et al., 2003). Table 7 shows that most measures included in this systematic review were considered reliable, especially existing measures, in comparison to adapted and created measures.

Validity is a multifaceted concept determined by relations with other variables and the five main types of validity: criterion, content, construct, discriminant and face were assessed in the present systematic review. This enabled us to consider how well measures correlate with an established criterion, examines all the targeted aspects of a construct, considers the hypothetical qualities it was designed to measure and has a pattern of relationship between measures of two constructs consistent with theoretical expectation.

While most articles reported validity, it was clear that measures more commonly demonstrated reliability rather than validity, especially for adapted and author-created measures, such as The Perceptions of Transition Survey, which was created by Smith et al. (2008). This scale demonstrated reliability but acknowledged that a limitation of the study was that the measurement was modified from a checklist format and lacked extensive evidence of its psychometric properties, particularly concerning statistical tests of validity.

It was also clear that scale adaptations have been subject to inconsistent reliability and validity testing. For example, when considering adapted existing measures within the category transitions experiences, six articles adapted Akos’ (2002) Transition Questionnaire, three articles adapted Sirsch’s (2003) ITCT questionnaire, and one article adapted Thomasson et al.’s (2006) SCQ. However, what is particularly concerning is that none of these adapted measures were considered to have validity and only seven demonstrated reliability.

As discussed above, significantly more articles within the category transitions experiences have adapted or developed a measure, as opposed to creating one. For example, all of the articles within this systematic review which used an existing measure to assess transitions experiences used Thomasson et al.’s (2006) SCQ. This scale, which was developed in the UK, has established validity and reliability, and most of the articles within this review have also implemented this scale in the UK in the context of primary-secondary school transitions. However, this measure was published 16 years ago, and since then, discourse around primary-secondary school transitions in some (although limited) more recent studies has changed. This is also reflected in some of the more recently created scales such as Madjar and Chohat’s (2017) Academic Aspects of Transition Self-Efficacy and Social Aspects of Transition Self-Efficacy scales which portrayed transition more positively in terms of mastery of goals and self-efficacy. Similarly, Bailey and Baines’ (2012) My Feelings About School Questionnaire contains 27 positively worded items to measure five aspects of school adjustment, such as item 3: ‘I am happy to be at this school’. Some of the adapted measures also align with this discourse, for example Lovette-Wilsona et al. (2020) adapted the Perception of Transition Survey (Akos, 2002) to a five point Likert scale (1 = very negative to 5 = very positive) that allowed for the exploration of both positive and negative feelings towards academic, procedural, and, social factors related to children’s transition to middle school, e.g. the open, judgement free question stem was used: “When you think about going to secondary school, rate how you feel about the following…” to introduce items, such as item 9: ‘being in a larger school’.

It is of note that the UK is leading the way in the development of measures which assess transitions experiences and general aspects of emotional wellbeing. For transitions experiences, 16 out of the 27 measures were designed in the UK. For general aspects of emotional wellbeing, 13 of 19 measures were designed in the UK.

The SDQ (Goodman, 2001) is the most popular scale used within the category general aspects of emotional adjustment, with 11 articles, by different authors, using this scale. The SDQ is a widely used measure with good factorial validity, internal reliability and test–retest reliability (Goodman, 2001). It is regarded as a validated and widely used measure of children’s wellbeing, and in the context of primary-secondary school transitions, the emotional symptoms and peer problems subscales have been categorised as a broader measure of emotional wellbeing (Bloyce & Frederickson, 2012), psychological adjustment (Rice et al., 2011) and psychological functioning (Riglin et al., 2013). However, this scale was published over two decades ago and does not always show adequate internal consistency, with lower Cronbach’s alpha coefficients frequently reported for peer problems SDQ subscales (α range = 0.30 – 0.59) (D’Souza et al., 2017), and homogeneity across samples. Nonetheless, Cronbach’s alpha can also be affected by scale length, and due to the SDQ subscales only consisting of five items each, it is possible that low alpha values are due to the small number of items for each subscale. Thus, as discussed above it is important that internal consistency is assessed using different estimators of scale reliability (McCrae et al., 2011).