Seth Margolis, Daniel Ozer, Sonja Lyubomirsky, and I have designed a new measure of overall life satisfaction. We believe that this measure improves on the most widely used multi-item measure of life satisfaction, Diener et al.'s Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985).
Diener's SLWS consists of the following five questions, each answered on a 1-7 scale from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree":
SWLS items:
One often-noted feature of the SWLS is that the first four items are direct measures of current life satisfaction, whereas the fifth item concerns regret about the past. Accordingly, the fifth item generally has lower factor loadings onto the scale than the first four items, which are a more tightly clustered group that people tend to answer similarly. A more unified construct might cut the fifth item.
However, we like the fifth item. Instead of cutting it, we think a good measure of life satisfaction should have more items like it, creating a broader target. To see why, consider a hypothetical respondent who answers the first four SWLS questions with "strongly agree" but who also feels intense envy of others' lives, is full of regrets, and wants to change their life path. Such a respondent, we think, should not be regarded as having maximum life satisfaction. Envy, regret, and desire to change are all either indirect signs of, or direct constituents of, dissatisfaction. A good measure of life satisfaction should include questions about them.
It is this issue -- how should we conceptualize (and thus measure) life satisfaction -- that's my own central concern in this project. Readers familiar with my general approach to attitudes will be unsurprised to hear that I favor a broad, dispositional approach to overall life satisfaction. A person truly satisfied with their life is not just someone who is disposed to sincerely say "I'm satisfied" but someone who is also disposed to act and react generally in ways concordant with being satisfied, i.e., not desperately seeking to change their circumstances, not seething with envy at others' situations, etc.
Also, in constructing a new measure, we wanted to have some reverse-scored, negatively-valenced items to mitigate acquiescence bias (that is, a tendency to say "yes" to most questions).
Thus, we created a scale with three SWLS-like items and three reverse-scored, negatively-valenced items targeting envy, regret, and desire to change. The items are presented in random order and answered (like the SWLS) on a 1-7 scale from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree".
RLSS items:
To test this new measure, we ran three studies (all described in our final manuscript version). In Study 1, we selected the final six items above from a larger pool. Across the three studies, we examined inter-item correlations and factor loadings among our six selected items, and we correlated our new measure with the SWLS, the Big 5 personality traits, several demographic variables, measures of positive and negative emotions or affect, the Psychological Well-Being Scale, the Schwartz Values Survey, and a measure of socially desirable responding.
The details are available in our paper, but a few highlights are:
(1.) Despite our use of the three negatively-valenced indirect items targeting a broader underlying phenomenon, the SWLS and RLSS showed high and almost identical levels of internal consistency, suggesting that our addition of these items didn't harm the coherence and unity of the measure.
(2.) The RLSS correlated highly with the SWLS (r = .88, .89), suggesting that most existing research relying on the SWLS would generate similar results had the RLSS been used instead. Thus, despite (we think) improvements, it is not targeting a radically different phenomenon.
(3.) Finally, the RLSS consistently correlated slightly better than did the SWLS with measures of self-reported emotions, the Psychological Well Being Scale, and the Big 5 personality trait of Negative Emotionality. Thus, arguably, the RLSS is slightly more centrally located than the SWLS in this network of related psychological phenomena.
[Thanks to Dan Haybron's Templeton grant for funding!]
7 comments:
I'm not familiar with the nuances of life satisfaction scales, but reading through the questions I'm struck that two of the questions seems much better suited to someone in mid/late-life than someone at my stage of life (22 years old).
"I am satisfied with where I am in life right now."
My Response: 2/7
I work long hours at an entry level job for relatively little pay. I'm hopeful this is a worthwhile sacrifice for the future - indeed, the anticipation of this future success bring some satisfaction to my life now, but I wouldn't confuse it with having attained that full satisfaction. Additionally, I hope to get married one day, own a home, etc., and while I feel no pressing need to achieve these goals, I'd be wary of judging my life as fully satisfied without them. (If achieving these goals doesn't bring me more satisfaction, what is the point of trying to achieve them? // If I am fully satisfied with my life now, what point is there to continue to strive forward?)
"Those around me seem to be living better lives than my own."
Response: 5/7
Despite what social science might suggest, if I genuinely believed my happiness was going to peak at 22, that'd be pretty depressing. Thus, I surely hope people around me are living better lives than I am!
Presumably, both these replies would decrease the scale's measure of my happiness. Yet, I would argue that having these goals - to live a better life, to live a more satisfactory life in the future - when I'm 22 and these goals still feel very much achievable, is exactly what makes me happy. Having goals at 22 that make the future seems better than the present pseudo-paradoxically brings happiness to the present. On the other hand, if I was 60 and felt my best chance for living a more satisfying life had already passed me by...well, I might still give the same numerical scores, but I'd likely feel substantially worse off.
As I mentioned, I'm not familiar with life satisfactory scales...is there any way that these scales account for nuances such as the above?
Thanks, anon! Interesting point about age. That does seem right, though these types of questions are standard -- and maybe it's age-appropriate to be not yet fully satisfied in youth?
One of our larger aims is to compare *different* measures of well-being -- life satisfaction being only one of them. Life satisfaction might reasonably come apart from other measures of well-being, such as hedonic pleasure and objective achievement. We don't intend this measure as a general-purpose measure of "happiness". It is exactly our aim to see how we might tease apart different conceptions of happiness and well-being.
How do scoring for this new scale measured? Is there any table like the previous SWLS where 31 - 35 is considered as Extremely satisfied.
Thank you
Muhd: The three negative items are reversed, and then the total is summed. We analyze the data parametrically rather than dividing into categories.
is there any blueprint in RLSS?
Hi Sir,
Does this scale require permission to use or may I use it freely in my research study without reaching out to you/any of the other authors personally via email/any other method? (with citations of course!)
Free to use!
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