Life satisfaction: how the SWLS asks you to judge your life by your own standards

Ask two people how their life is going and they may answer about different things. One thinks of a stable job and enough money. The other thinks of friends, or of the book they never finished writing. Neither answer is wrong. In 1985 Ed Diener, Robert Emmons, Randy Larsen and Sharon Griffin built a questionnaire around that fact: it lets you decide what counts.

Their Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) has five short statements and became one of the most used wellbeing measures in research. Our Life Satisfaction test (SWLS) uses the same five statements.

Five statements, no checklist

The items include "In most ways my life is close to my ideal", "I am satisfied with my life" and "If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing". The other two ask whether the conditions of your life are excellent and whether you have gotten the important things you want so far. You answer each on a seven-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree, the same format as the original. No item is scored in reverse, and all five feed one score.

The scale never mentions health, work, money or relationships. Many earlier measures added up satisfaction across such areas, which assumes everyone weighs them the same way. Diener's team followed a definition from Doh Chull Shin and Dan Johnson (1978): life satisfaction is an overall judgement of your life against criteria you choose yourself. If work matters little to you, a dull job pulls your score down only as far as you let it.

A judgement, not a mood

Life satisfaction is the thinking side of wellbeing. Feeling happy in the everyday sense is closer to how often you feel good. The two usually go together, but not always. In 2010 Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton analysed answers from a large US Gallup survey. People's evaluations of their lives kept rising with income, while their day-to-day emotions levelled off. Later studies have argued about where that levelling off happens, but the gap between judging your life and feeling good in it has held up.

If your own question is more about mood than about standards, read our post on the Subjective Happiness Scale, which compares the two.

Why a sunny day can change your answer

Judging your whole life is hard, so people use shortcuts, and current mood is one of them. In 1983 Norbert Schwarz and Gerald Clore phoned people on sunny and on rainy days. Those called on sunny days reported higher life satisfaction. When the interviewer first mentioned the weather, the difference disappeared, because people then set their mood aside as a source of information.

So take the test on an ordinary day. If you took it right after very good or very bad news, take it again a few weeks later and compare.

Reading your score

A high score means that, by your own standards, your life is going well. It does not mean your life is easy. A low score does not mean something is wrong with you either. More often it points to a gap between what you want and what you have, and the statement you agreed with least shows where that gap sits. Low agreement with "In most ways my life is close to my ideal" says something different from a low answer about the conditions of your life, which may depend on things outside your control.

The SWLS is not a screening tool for depression. If a low score comes with weeks of low mood, poor sleep or loss of interest, take the PHQ-9 depression test and consider talking to a doctor or psychologist.

If your answers made you wonder what your standards actually are, try the purpose in life test or read how to discover your life values.