Measuring Happiness: Satisfaction With Life Scale

Today is a quick review of another happiness measurement tool: the Satisfaction With Life Scale

As a little bit of review, these are the measurement tools I found for happiness and plan to explore. These came from the site: Pursuit of Happiness.

Existing Methods of Measuring Happiness

This tool is fairly short, similar to the size of the Subjective Happiness Scale. That being the case I'm going to just include the whole thing here:

Instructions: Below are five statements that you may agree or disagree with. Using the 1 -
7 scale below, indicate your agreement with each item by placing the appropriate number
on the line preceding that item. Please be open and honest in your responding

• 7 - Strongly agree
• 6 - Agree
• 5 - Slightly agree
• 4 - Neither agree nor disagree
• 3 - Slightly disagree
• 2 - Disagree
• 1 - Strongly disagree

_3_ In most ways my life is close to my ideal.
_4_ The conditions of my life are excellent.
_2_ I am satisfied with my life.
_3_ So far I have gotten the important things I want in life.
_1_ If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing

Scoring:
Though scoring should be kept continuous (sum up scores on each item), here are some cutoffs to be used as benchmarks.

 31 - 35 Extremely satisfied
 26 - 30 Satisfied
 21 - 25 Slightly satisfied
 20 Neutral
 15 - 19 Slightly dissatisfied
 10 - 14 Dissatisfied
 5 - 9 Extremely dissatisfied 



My Score: 13
Apparently I'm currently dissatisfied with my life. Which is accurate. 

Summary

Again I love the simplicity of this measurement tool - it is quick and can be taken within a period of a few minutes to get a bead on my satisfaction with life. There is something to be said though about what exactly the tool measures (satisfaction with life) and how that may differ in subtle ways from what I'm hoping to measure (happiness). I believe it is possible to be "Satisfied" with life but still not be happy. Because of that I still favor the Subjective Happiness Scale and will likely use that going forward - assuming one of the remaining 2 tools doesn't shine brighter.  











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