Media release

From: PLOS

Life satisfaction measurement tool provides robust information across nations, genders, ages, languages

Scale has potential to identify common themes in life satisfaction and inform strategies for boosting wellbeing around the world

Data on almost 57,000 people from 65 countries suggests that the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS)—a widely used research tool—generally holds up well when applied across diverse groups of people, underscoring its potential value in research and policymaking. Viren Swami of Anglia Ruskin University, U.K., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on January 22, 2025.

Life satisfaction is linked to a broad range of life areas, such as physical health, employment, and mortality. The SWLS is a questionnaire that measures an individual’s life satisfaction, aiding research on the topic. The SWLS is generally known to be statistically useful for assessing life satisfaction within a given demographic group, such as people of a single nationality or in a specific age range.

However, it has been less clear how effective the SWLS is for comparisons across diverse groups, such as people of different nationalities, languages, gender identities, or age groups—a statistical quality known as “measurement invariance.” A major challenge for assessing the measurement invariance of a tool like SWLS is the need for a large, global-scale dataset.

To meet that challenge, Swami and an international team of colleagues turned to data from a project known as the Body Image in Nature Survey (BINS), which includes SWLS data collected from thousands of people worldwide from 2020 to 2022. They analyzed SWLS results for 56,968 BINS participants representing 65 different nations, 40 languages, and diverse gender identities and ages.

Their analysis suggests that, overall, the SWLS has universal applicability; it appears to be generally successful in capturing life satisfaction across nations, gender identities, age groups, and languages.

It also enabled identification of some common themes: for example, across nations, greater life satisfaction was significantly associated with greater financial security as well as being in a committed relationship or married. With respect to age, there was a small but significant association between older age and higher SWLS scores, and with respect to gender, women and men both reported higher SWLS scores than those who identified as another gender, although the researchers note that only 0.6% of their sample identified as another gender.

However, the SWLS does not achieve perfect measurement invariance for all demographic categories, in particular nation. On the basis of their findings, the researchers urge caution when applying the SWLS across nations. They outline potential directions for future cross-national research to inform strategies for improving life satisfaction worldwide.

The authors add: “Our results also show that there are large differences in life satisfaction across nations and languages, which in turn may help practitioners and policy-makers to promote better psychological well-being across the globe.”