Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS)



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Related Links

• Income and subjective well-being
• Defining and measuring subjective well-being across cultures
• Measuring subjective well-being with methods in addition to self-report scales
• Personality (and temperament) and subjective well-being
• Values and norms and subjective well-being
• Life satisfaction
• Positive moods and emotions
• International and cultural differences in subjective well-being

Satisfaction with Life Scale

The SWLS is a short, 5-item instrument designed to measure global cognitive judgments of one's lives. The scale usually requires only about one minute of respondent time. The scale is not copyrighted, and can be used without charge and without permission by all professionals (researchers and practitioners). The scale takes about one minute to complete, and is in the public domain. A description of psychometric properties of the scale can be found in Pavot and Diener, 1993 Psychological Assessment.

Well-Being by Decades of Life

The figure above illustrates the level of 4 well-being variables across different age groups in an international sample including more than 60 thousand adults across 43 nations (Diener & Suh, in press). Objective resources, such as income and marriage percentage, decline considerably with increasing age. Despite the losses in objective resources, however, elderly people experience more satisfaction with their overall life than younger adults. The most probable explanation for this rather counterintuitive result is that elderly people adjust their expectations and goals according to the constraints of their situation. The lack of strong association between objective resources (e.g., age) and subjective well-being is one of the most reliable and fascinating findings in the field.