Running head: RIVERSIDE LIFE SATISFACTION SCALE 1 A New Measure of Life Satisfaction: The Riverside Life Satisfaction Scale
نویسندگان
چکیده
The Satisfaction With Life Scale (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985) has been the dominant measure of life satisfaction since its creation over 30 years ago. We sought to develop an improved measure that includes indirect indicators of life satisfaction (e.g., wishing to change one’s life) to increase the bandwidth of the measure and account for acquiescence bias. In three studies, we developed a 6-item measure of life satisfaction, the Riverside Life Satisfaction Scale, and obtained reliability and validity evidence. Importantly, the Riverside Life Satisfaction Scale retained the high internal consistency, test-retest stability, and unidimensionality of the Satisfaction With Life Scale. In addition, the Riverside Life Satisfaction Scale correlated with other well-being measures, Big Five personality traits, values, and demographic information in expected ways. Although the Riverside Life Satisfaction Scale correlated highly with the Satisfaction With Life Scale, we believe it improves the Satisfaction With Life Scale by appropriately increasing construct breadth and reducing the potential for bias. RIVERSIDE LIFE SATISFACTION SCALE 3 A New Measure of Life Satisfaction: The Riverside Life Satisfaction Scale Over the past few decades, research on well-being has grown dramatically (Diener, 2013). One of the most catalytic events in the history of well-being science occurred when Diener (1984) formally defined subjective well-being, thereby providing a shared conception for well-being researchers—one that is used by scientists and policy makers to this day. Subjective well-being, according to Diener (1984), is comprised of both affective well-being (i.e., positive and negative affect) and life satisfaction. Life satisfaction is a cognitive evaluation of one’s own life as a whole (Shin & Johnson, 1978). Importantly, life satisfaction judgments are based on one’s own subjective criteria, rather than necessarily reflecting outward conditions (hence, the label subjective). To study life satisfaction, Diener and his colleagues created a life satisfaction measure: the 5-item Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS; Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985). With the rapid growth in subjective well-being research, the SWLS garnered wide adoption, with translations and administration all over the world. Both mean levels (Diener, Diener, & Diener, 1995) and correlates (Suh, Diener, Oishi, & Triandis, 1998) of the SWLS have been found to differ across countries. Unfortunately, some SWLS items also appear to function differently across countries (Oishi, 2006; Tucker, Ozer, Lyubomirsky, & Boehm, 2006). At this writing, the paper introducing the SWLS had over 19,000 citations. Currently, the SWLS is the dominant multiple-item measure of life satisfaction. Most studies that require a multiple-item measure of life satisfaction use the SWLS. However, researchers do not always wish to include a multiple-item measure of life satisfaction. Large panel studies, for example, instead of using the SWLS, commonly use single items to RIVERSIDE LIFE SATISFACTION SCALE 4 assess life satisfaction, such as “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life?” (Lucas & Donnellan, 2012). Reliability estimates for single-item life satisfaction measures are typically around 0.7 (Lucas & Donnellan, 2012), sufficient for some purposes (Lucas & Donnellan, 2012) but nevertheless likely to result in attenuated validity coefficients. Thus, when life satisfaction is an important construct in a research program, a multiple-item measure should be preferred. Generally, life satisfaction can be measured with multiple items in three ways. The first approach is the one adopted by the SWLS, where all items directly indicate overall life satisfaction or closely related concepts like contentedness. Second, life satisfaction can be measured by assessing satisfaction with one’s past, present, and future lives. The Temporal Satisfaction With Life Scale (TSWLS) accomplishes this by including each of the SWLS items thrice (once for each time frame; Pavot, Diener, & Suh, 1998). Unsurprisingly, the creators of the TSWLS found that it correlated highly with the SWLS (approximately r = .84; Pavot, Diener, & Suh, 1998). The added dimensions of the TSWLS showed incremental validity and separated neatly into three factors. However, data from Chinese university students suggest that some items of the TSWLS have low factor loadings and including only three items (instead of five) per time frame may be preferable. Lastly, life satisfaction may be inferred from items that individually refer to satisfaction with a different life domain (e.g., finances, friendships, health; cf. Michalos, 1980). However, most studies seem to be targeting overall life satisfaction rather than particular domain satisfactions. Accordingly, a measure with items that assess overall life satisfaction is desirable for two reasons. First, measuring domain satisfaction involves a trade-off between comprehensiveness and efficiency. Presumably, one needs to assess satisfaction with many RIVERSIDE LIFE SATISFACTION SCALE 5 domains of life to encompass all the possible domains that impact overall life satisfaction. However, in the interest of efficiency, researchers must limit the number of assessed domains. The cost of this approach is that one may be inadvertently omitting a domain that significantly impacts overall life satisfaction, whether for the majority of respondents or for a critical subset of the sample. Second, a related challenge concerns how to sum domain satisfactions into an overall life satisfaction score. Presumably, all domains should not be weighted equally in that summation. Satisfaction with one’s family may be more important for life satisfaction than satisfaction with one’s leisure activities. Further complicating this matter, the optimal weights of each domain may not be uniform across individuals. Some participants may value their family life over their work life, and the opposite may be true for others. These challenges should not discourage researchers from measuring domain satisfaction, as such measures are valuable to address particular research questions. However, issues arise when one wishes to infer overall life satisfaction from domain satisfactions. When researchers wish to measure overall life satisfaction with more than one item, the SWLS is easily the most frequent choice. The SWLS has accumulated validity evidence in hundreds of studies and resulted in significant scientific advances—not only in well-being science but across a range of disciplines, from behavioral economics and organizational behavior to clinical psychology and leisure studies (Pavot & Deiner, 1993, 2008). Our aim is to put forward a new measure with some strengths that the SWLS, despite its virtues, nonetheless lacks. In the most recent review of the SWLS, Pavot and Diener (2008) acknowledge that the fifth item of the scale (“If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing”) consistently has lower factor loadings than the other four items. Pavot and Diener (2008) explain that this item prompts one to consider the past, whereas the other items implicitly reference one’s present RIVERSIDE LIFE SATISFACTION SCALE 6 life (e.g., “In most ways my life is close to my ideal”). In addition, the first four items of the SWLS are direct indicators of satisfaction with life (e.g., “I am satisfied with my life”), whereas the fifth item represents an indirect (though certainly not subtle) indicator (Paulhus & Vazire, 2007). It is possible for a person to be fully satisfied with her life at the time of assessment, yet (perhaps due to earlier hardship) wish that her past had been different. Faced with this circumstance, one might opt to delete the fifth item and proceed with a four-item scale utilizing only the direct indicators of life satisfaction. Yet, we believe the original choice to retain the fifth indirect item was preferable, and that increasing the number of such indirect items to balance the scale is a wiser alternative for several reasons. First, the inclusion of reverse-scored indirect indicators reduces acquiescence bias—a tendency by respondents to agree with items—which may impact the SWLS (Danner, Aichholzer & Rammstedt, 2015; Pavot & Diener, 1993). Reverse-scored items, or negativelyworded or negatively-valenced items in a scale that also includes positively-worded or positively valenced items, may produce a second factor due to method effects (DiStefano & Motl, 2009; Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Lee, & Podsakoff, 2003). However, we believe it is preferable to have both regularly-scored positively-valenced items and reverse-scored negatively-valenced items. When all items are scored in the same direction, reflecting positively-valenced attributes, the magnitude of method effects cannot be assessed. Conversely, with both negative and positive items, method effects can be tested and controlled for. Importantly, a second reason to include negative, indirect indicators is that life satisfaction is a construct that involves a broad range of sub-attitudes. Life satisfaction can be inferred not only from direct statements of life satisfaction, but also from statements regarding coveting others’ lives, regrets about the past, and dreaming to RIVERSIDE LIFE SATISFACTION SCALE 7 remake one’s life. These indirect indicators assess important elements of life satisfaction, and including such items increases bandwidth. As reflected in the fifth SWLS item, satisfaction with one’s life should not be understood merely as a matter of being willing to assent to explicit statements that one is satisfied. As noted above, other important components of overall life satisfaction include not regretting one’s past decisions, not wanting to shift the path one’s life is on, and not enviously wishing that one’s life were more like the lives of others. A hypothetical respondent who answers near maximum on questions like “I am satisfied with my life” but who reports substantial regret about her choices, a desire to change life paths, and envy for her peers’ seemingly superior lives should score only moderately in overall life satisfaction, rather than, as with the current SWLS, near the top of the scale. Presumably, the more that people endorse such indirectly negative thoughts, the less satisfied they are with their lives. Such statements represent affirmative indications that one is dissatisfied with one’s life. To the extent that life satisfaction is an important construct worth measuring, it should involve both the positive affirmation that one is satisfied or content with one’s life, as well as an absence of serious regret, desire to change, and envy of others’ lives. To this end, we sought to design a measure of life satisfaction, called the Riverside Life Satisfaction Scale (RLSS), meeting these desiderata: 1. It contains a balance of regularly-scored and reverse-scored items. 2. It includes indicators of regret, envy, and desire to change, as well as more standard explicit measures of satisfaction, to reflect an appropriately broad understanding of the construct of life satisfaction. 3. It correlates highly with the existing SWLS, as well as other closely related measures. RIVERSIDE LIFE SATISFACTION SCALE 8 4. It has a single dominant factor (i.e., unidimensionality) and high reliability
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