Satisfaction With Life Scale SWLS
Satisfaction With Life Scale SWLS overview
Creator and Context
The Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) is a five item measure of a person's global judgement of their own life satisfaction.
It was developed by Ed Diener, Robert Emmons, Randy Larsen and Sharon Griffin and published in 1985. It is one of the most widely used measures in wellbeing research.
Diener's own guidance permits use by researchers with credit given, and states that use is permitted for non commercial purposes only.
Presenting Conditions
The SWLS measures the cognitive component of subjective wellbeing: the person's own overall judgement of how satisfied they are with their life against their own criteria.
It is unidimensional and has no subscales. It deliberately does not measure positive or negative affect.
Administration
Self administered in about a minute. Each of the five statements is rated from Strongly disagree (1) to Strongly agree (7). There are no reverse scored items and no recall window: it is a global, trait level judgement.
Desired Audience
Adults, and also used with adolescents, in general population and clinical settings.
Symptom reduction is not the same as a life worth living, and the SWLS is one of the few instruments that asks the second question. Five items and a minute is a very cheap way of finding out whether treatment has actually changed anything that matters to the person.
Considerations
It measures cognitive life satisfaction only. It is not a clinical or diagnostic instrument and has no clinical cut off.
The interpretive bands are descriptive conventions from Diener's own guidance, not validated diagnostic thresholds.
The 7 point and 5 point response formats are not interchangeable and have different norms.
Diener's guidance states that use is permitted for non commercial purposes only. This is a material constraint and should be confirmed before commercial deployment.
How to score the Satisfaction With Life Scale SWLS
Conducting the assessment
The person rates five statements from 1 to 7. All items are scored in the same direction.
Interpretation
Items are summed to give a total from 5 to 35. Higher scores indicate greater life satisfaction.
Diener's descriptive bands:
31 to 35 extremely satisfied
26 to 30 satisfied
21 to 25 slightly satisfied
20 neutral
15 to 19 slightly dissatisfied
10 to 14 dissatisfied
5 to 9 extremely dissatisfied
These are interpretive conventions, not clinical thresholds.
Clinical Considerations
Read it alongside a symptom measure. A falling symptom score with a static life satisfaction score usually means the person feels less unwell but their life has not changed.
Do not treat the bands as clinical thresholds.
Keep the response format consistent across time points.
Satisfaction With Life Scale SWLS use cases
Measuring global life satisfaction
Outcome reporting where wellbeing rather than symptom reduction is the goal
Programme and population level wellbeing evaluation
Research in subjective wellbeing
Category
General Well-being
Research Summary
Diener, E., Emmons, R. A., Larsen, R. J., & Griffin, S. (1985). The Satisfaction With Life Scale. Journal of Personality Assessment, 49(1), 71 to 75.
Pavot, W., & Diener, E. (1993). Review of the Satisfaction With Life Scale. Psychological Assessment, 5(2), 164 to 172.
Pavot, W., & Diener, E. (2008). The Satisfaction With Life Scale and the emerging construct of life satisfaction. Journal of Positive Psychology, 3(2), 137 to 152.
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