2.3.2. Life Satisfaction

The Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) is a short 5-item scale developed by Diener et al. [1] to assess global cognitive judgments of one's life satisfaction. An individual chooses how much they agree with a given item on a seven-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree). Higher scores indicate a higher level of life satisfaction, ranging from 5–9 = extremely dissatisfied, 10–14 = dissatisfied, 15–19 = slightly dissatisfied, 20 = neutral, 21–25 = slightly satisfied, 26–30 = satisfied, and 31–35 = extremely satisfied. The Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) provides evidence of a stable one-factor structure, high reliability, validity, and invariance for sex [1,11,12,81–83]. The Cronbach's α for the SWLS in the present sample was 0.81 during W1 and 0.85 during W2.
