Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Well-Being (Including Life Satisfaction)

Introduction

Over the past quarter century, measures intended to assess Subjective Well-Being (SWB) have substantially increased, in terms of both the number of measures available and the sophistication of these measures. In this entry, we will briefly review a selected sampling of such measures, as well as some of the issues surrounding assessment in this domain. After defining the relevant constructs, we will present sections on measurement issues, measures of life satisfaction, measures of positive affect, general measures of well-being, and measures of low negative affect. A section focused on future issues and directions will be followed by a final section of conclusions.

Defining Subjective Well-Being

Most investigators engaged in research on SWB conceptualize it as a multi-faceted domain of interest, rather than as a unitary construct. A representative definition is provided by Diener, Suh, Lucas, and Smith (1999): ‘Subjective well-being is a broad category of phenomena that includes people's emotional responses, domain satisfactions, and global judgments of life satisfaction’ (p. 277). People's emotional or affective responses (including both moods and emotions) represent ‘on-line’ (Diener, 2000: 34) evaluations of events that are happening to them. Judgements of life satisfaction represent broader, more cognitively based evaluations of one's life as a whole (Pavot & Diener, 1993), and domain satisfactions represent evaluations of specific aspects of one's life (e.g. work satisfaction, marital satisfaction). These components often are substantially correlated; yet, when measured separately, they frequently account for unique variance when predicting overall SWB, and therefore are properly assessed independently with specifically dedicated instruments. Although early attempts at assessment often involved very simplistic measures (in many cases, a single item) intended to capture the whole domain of SWB, most contemporary measures incorporate multiple-item formats and are focused on only one component of SWB.

Measurement Issues

Researchers who intend to assess some aspect of SWB should be aware of a number of factors which could influence the validity of their efforts. In this section, we will briefly present some of the more prominent threats to validity, and suggest some possible methodological strategies which should serve to reduce these threats.

Reliability Issues

As noted above, many early efforts to assess SWB relied on a single item embedded in a multiple purpose questionnaire. Although single-item measures do appear to have some degree of validity, their test-retest reliability is often relatively low (Schwarz & Strack, 1999), and their internal consistency is impossible to determine. For reasons of reliability, the use of single-item self-report measures of SWB should be avoided, where possible, in favour of multiple-item measures. Most contemporary measures of SWB incorporate a multiple-item structure, and as a consequence typically have good psychometric characteristics.

Contextual Influences

Summarizing evidence from a number of studies, Schwarz and Strack (1999) made a strong case that momentary mood states or relatively trivial contextual events (e.g. finding a dime) can influence reports of global SWB, under some circumstances to a substantial degree. Single-item measures of SWB are particularly vulnerable to momentary contextual influences. A methodological step that can serve to reduce the influence of momentary contextual effects is to assess the respondent's SWB on multiple occasions, rather than at only one point in time. These multiple assessments can then be averaged into a composite SWB score. This procedure can effectively reduce the effects of momentary contextual influences, assuming that the contextual influences at Time 1 are different than at Time 2, and so on.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution