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Investigating Validity Evidence of the Satisfaction with Life Scale Adapted for Children

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Abstract

This study introduces the Satisfaction with Life Scale adapted for Children (SWLS-C) and presents psychometric findings regarding its validation. The SWLS-C was adapted from the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS; Diener et al. 1985), which is one of the most commonly used measures to assess satisfaction with life in adults. Three subject matter experts adapted the SWLS by changing the wording of the item stem and response format in order to make it more understandable for children. A stratified random sample of 1,233 students (48% girls) in grades 4–7 (mean age 11 years and 7 months) provided data on the SWLS-C and measures of optimism, self-concept, self-efficacy, depression, emphatic concern, and perspective taking. The SWLS-C demonstrated a unidimensional factor structure and high internal consistency. Furthermore, differential item functioning and differential scale functioning analyses indicated that the SWLS-C measures satisfaction with life in the same way for different groups of children (i.e., with regard to gender, first language learned at home—English vs. other language(s) than English—and across different grades) at the item and at the scale level. Associations between scores on the SWLS-C and demographic variables were statistically non-significant or of small effect size. In addition, the SWLS-C showed evidence of convergent and discriminant validity in relation to the other measures. Our results indicate that the SWLS-C is a psychometrically sound instrument that demonstrated evidence of construct validity for this age group. Limitations and future directions are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Shek (2007) adapted the response format from the original seven-point to a six-point Likert-type scale.

  2. In the following when we use the term children, we refer to individuals in the developmental periods of middle childhood and early adolescence.

  3. The correlation between life satisfaction and depression was negative, whereas the other ones were positive.

  4. A child that receives ratings below a specific cut-off score for one or more developmental domains is considered developmentally vulnerable, and neighborhood-level vulnerability rates are determined by calculating the percentage of children within a given neighborhood that are considered as developmentally vulnerable.

  5. The language label ‘Chinese’ consisted of children responding with Chinese, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Taiwanese.

  6. For the five- and four-point Likert-type response format of the SWLS-C and the other measures, ordinal coefficient alpha is the coefficient of choice but we also report Cronbach’s coefficient alpha due to its familiarity to most researchers.

  7. Children who reported that they first learned English and another language at home (8%) were excluded from the analysis.

  8. For the analysis of each item, we used the corrected item-total scale.

  9. Cohen suggested a rule of thumb for interpreting effect sizes according to which correlations of .10 are considered to be of small, .30 to be of medium, and .50 to be of large effect size.

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Acknowledgments

This project was made possible through the generous support of United Way of the Lower Mainland and a Cordula and Gunter Paetzold Fellowship, University of British Columbia. We would like to thank Dr. Anita Hubley and Martin Guhn for their feedback on this manuscript. Part of this study was presented at the 2007 conference of the International Society for Quality of Life Studies, San Diego, CA.

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  1. Department of ECPS, University of British Columbia, 2125 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T-1Z4, Canada

    Anne M. Gadermann, Kimberly A. Schonert-Reichl & Bruno D. Zumbo

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  1. Anne M. Gadermann
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Gadermann, A.M., Schonert-Reichl, K.A. & Zumbo, B.D. Investigating Validity Evidence of the Satisfaction with Life Scale Adapted for Children. Soc Indic Res 96, 229–247 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-009-9474-1

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