Satisfaction with Life Scale

Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS)

The SWLS is a short 5-item instrument designed to measure global cognitive judgments of satisfaction with one's life. The scale usually requires only about one minute of a respondent's time. The scale is in the public domain (not copyrighted) and therefore you are free to use it without permission or charge by all professionals (researchers and practitioners) as long as you give credit to the authors of the scale: Ed Diener, Robert A. Emmons, Randy J. Larsen and Sharon Griffin as noted in the 1985 article in the Journal of Personality Assessment.

SWLS - English

In order to better understand the scores of the SWLS, please read the document below.

Understanding the SWLS scores

Important Papers on the SWLS:

If you would like to know more about SWLS and its related research, please read the following papers, whose references are below. An especially critical paper regarding the SWLS is the Pavot and Diener (1993) paper. Some of these papers can be found on the reprint page.

Diener, E., Emmons, R. A., Larsen, R. J., & Griffin, S. (1985). The Satisfaction with Life Scale. Journal of Personality Assessment, 49, 71-75.

Pavot, W. G., Diener, E., Colvin, C. R., & Sandvik, E. (1991). Further validation of the Satisfaction with Life Scale: Evidence for the cross-method convergence of well-being measures. Journal of Personality Assessment, 57, 149-161.

Pavot, W., & Diener, E. (1993). Review of the Satisfaction with Life Scale. Psychological Assessment, 5, 164-172.

Pavot, W., & Diener, E. (2007; forthcoming). Current findings on the Satisfaction with Life Scale.

SWLS Translations:

Below are translations of the SWLS into various languages. Feel free to translate the SWLS into other languages. However, we would appreciate it if you could send us a copy of the translation so we can update this list.