Step 1: Taking the Assessment - Guidelines
Before you start answering the questions in the assessment, here are the specifics you'll need to know. The assessment consists of 120 statements (12 sections of 10 statements), each describing a wellness action, skill, belief, attitude, or awareness. Each section corresponds to 1 of the 12 components of the Wellness Energy System.
You will be asked two questions for each statement in the assessment:
How True?: How true is this statement for you at this point in your life?
How Satisfied?: How satisfied are you with your answer? This second question helps to determine how important a statement is to you in the list of priorities generated along with your score.
The Wellness Inventory is designed to educate by stimulating you to a new awareness of possibilities for change, more than it is to evaluate and score yourself. Since the statements are worded so that the "right" answer is obvious (because the major goals of the assessment are awareness and education), you can easily give yourself an artificially high score. To get the most from the Inventory, however, we urge you to be honest with yourself—you will benefit more by assessing where you are right now in each of the areas.
If you are puzzled by what a statement means or are unclear about how to respond to it, click on the "Don't understand" choice and you will be able to view a commentary to help clarify the statement. (All of the commentaries can later be viewed in the Self-Study Center. You can access the Self-Study Center whenever you log back in to the Wellness Inventory after having completed the assessment.)
After reading the commentary, if you still do not understand the statement, answer the "How true" portion to the best of your ability and leave your answer of "Do not understand" in the "How Satisfied?" portion. This will not affect your average Satisfaction Score.
Because wellness is often subjective (some items are unprovable by current scientific means), you may not agree with all of the values suggested in the statements. If this is the case for a particular statement, click on "Disagree with statement" to read the supporting commentary. We ask that you keep an open mind until you have read this more complete description of the item. If you still disagree, answer the "How true?" portion to the best of your ability and leave your answer of "Disagree with statement" in the "How satisfied" portion. This will not affect your average score.
Please remember that these wellness statements are not intended to be universal truths, but rather represent an effort to describe wellness attributes that are valuable for the majority of people most of the time.
You are now prepared to take the assessment and can do so now, or you can continue learning about the subsequent steps of interpreting your scores, creating a Personal Wellness Action Plan, and using the various resources to support that plan. If you elect to start the assessment now, the information on the remaining steps will be available to you at the conclusion of the assessment portion. | 