The Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS): appraisal with 1700 healthy youngadults in The Netherlands

The Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) was developed in the U.S.A. to repr esent a multi-item scale for the overall assessment of life satisfaction as a cognitive-judgemental process, rather than for the measurement of specif ic satisfaction domains (e.g. health, material wealth). The present study w as a further attempt to extend the applicability of the SWLS in a different cultural context (The Netherlands) using a large sample of healthy young a dults. In line with previous American and Dutch findings, figures on the in ternal structure of the SWLS were quite favourable. SWLS scores were also s hown to be predictably associated with marital status, indices of general h ealth, self-esteem, euphoria, dysphoria (-) and neuroticism (-), A high num ber of visits to the GP correlated significantly negatively with SWLS in ma les only, As anticipated, associations of the SWLS with biological sex, imp ulsivity, disinhibition and boredom susceptibility were negligibly low, The frequently reported substantial positive correlation with sociability was not confirmed. Instead, significant but small correlations were observed, t he yield of which was discussed in the context of findings showing that the re are other aspects of extraversion that are more strongly related to sati sfaction with life than sociability. These other aspects include assertiven ess in males and positive emotion in females. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd . All rights reserved.