CONFIRMATORY FACTOR-ANALYSIS OF THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL STUDENTS LIFE SATISFACTION SCALE

The assessment of children's life satisfaction (LS) is a relatively ne w area of research. To date, one of the most comprehensive investigati ons in this area has culminated in the development of the Multidimensi onal Students' Life Satisfaction Scale [MSLSS; Huebner, E. S. (1994). Preliminary development and validation of a multidimensional life sati sfaction scale for children. Psychological Assessment, 6, 149-158]. Th e first multidimensional scale of its kind, the MSLSS assesses childre n's subjective perceptions of LS in five conceptually relevant domains : Family, Friends, School, Self, and Living Environment. Initial inves tigations of its psychometric properties and relationships to theoreti cally related variables have supported the validity and reliability of the MSLSS. The present study builds upon this past research by assess ing the relative goodness-of-fit of the MSLSS using confirmatory facto r analytic procedures by means of the SPSS LISREL statistical package. Subjects were 314 children in Grades 3-8. Results of the analyses and their implications for the reliability and validity of the MSLSS are discussed. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.