Beyond life satisfaction: Lay conceptions of well-being among middle-aged and elderly adults

The present study examines lay conceptions of well-being in a representativ e sample of Germans in the second half of life. Respondents filled out a se ntence completion questionnaire as well as the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS). In their sentence completions, respondents gave spontaneous descri ptions of their lives as a whole in terms of satisfaction, quality (good/ba d), achievement, retrospection, and other global dimensions. They also refe rred to the intrapersonal and interpersonal domain, health and functioning, and other specific life domains in these sentence completions. Systematic differences were found in the dimensions referred to in positive and negati ve judgments and across age groups. Hardly any of the negative judgments we re couched in terms of life satisfaction. The sentence completions and the SWLS resulted in similar evaluations, but the personally meaningful dimensi ons of judgment which emerged from the sentence completions were only partl y covered by the dimensions inherent in the SWLS items. These findings are discussed in relation to existing studies on subjective well-being and succ essful aging, which appear to focus too narrowly on life satisfaction at th e expense of other personally meaningful dimensions of life judgments.