The Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale (MSLSS; Huebner, 1994) is a self-report inventory assessing young people’s satisfaction in five different life domains (i.e., satisfaction with family life, friendships, school experiences, self, and living environment). The present paper describes the adaptation (incl. the translation-back translation procedure), and initial validation of the German adaptation of this measure. About 400 participants (aged between 10 and 17 years) completed the German version of the MSLSS, and additional measures/items assessing information on different validation criteria (e.g., family climate, number of best friends, school experiences, living location, etc.). The five scales yielded satisfying reliabilities, and they showed small to medium age effects and small gender effects. Results on validity emerged as promising; for example, an oblique five-factor solution was found to represent the data well. Furthermore, a supporting and warm parenting style contributed mostly to participants’ satisfaction with the family life, and the location where the participants lived (e.g., urban vs. rural areas) was predictive of participants’ satisfaction with the living environment. Overall, the MSLSS demonstrated satisfying psychometric properties and promising initial evidence for its validity. Future studies are needed to provide further information on reliability and validity of the German version of the MSLSS.

The widely used Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener et al., 1985) measures respondents’ subjective global satisfaction with their lives on a cognitive-judgemental level and consists of five 7-point Likert-type items, with anchor labels ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). The sample (n=1192; South Africa= 676, Italy= 516 ) contained participants who completed the English and Italian versions of the scale, respectively. The data were analysed with Winsteps 3.81 and RUMM2030 using the Rasch rating scale model. Although the category thresholds were increasing monotonically, category 1 showed misfit to the Rasch model and the categories indicative of lower levels of satisfaction with life were the most likely to be endorsed on small regions of the latent trait. The effect of collapsing categories was explored. Item 5 (“If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing”) did not fit the Rasch model well. Differential item functioning was detected for age group for some collapsed category combinations, but none for country, gender or education level. Theoretical implications for understanding satisfaction with life and recommendations for future use of the scale are suggested.

According to the hedonic perspective, happiness is defined as subjective well-being, which refers to cognitive and affective evaluations of one's life. The vast majority of researchers use PANAS scales to measure the affective component of subjective well-being. These scales were constructed to assess high-arousal affects. Whereas some cultures favour high-arousal positive states, others value low-arousal positive states. Similar differences have been found between younger and older people. The aim of the present study is to examine the incremental validity of low-arousal affects in predicting well-being. 642 participants (mean age 44.3) from three countries completed the PANAS with additional eight low-arousal items, the Satisfaction with Life Scale, the Basic Psychological Needs Scale (the shortened nine-item version) and the Depression scale (DASS). The results from hierarchical multiple regression analyses show that low-arousal affect explain an additional 11% of the variance in life satisfaction and depression, and 6% in basic psychological needs over and above what could be predicted by PANAS. These findings indicate the importance of including low-arousal affect in assessing affective well-being.

The Authentic Happiness Inventory (AHI; Seligman et al., 2005) is a widely used instrument for the assessment of happiness. It was developed especially for the use in intervention studies, and is supposed to be particularly sensitive for detecting subtle changes in happiness and differentiating among high expressions of happiness. However, these assumptions have not been tested in detail so far. We examined the psychometric properties of the German version of the AHI, and compared its usefulness in intervention studies to the well-established Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS; Diener et al., 1985) in three studies. Data from three samples (n = 3,789/259/184) show factorial validity and high internal consistency. In a sample of 319 adults, we find high test-retest correlations (e.g., r = .75 for six months). Further data show that the AHI is sensitive to detect changes in well-being over six months in a placebo-controlled intervention study (using two well-established positive psychology interventions; sample sizes across the three groups vary between 127 and 137. Overall, the findings are encouraging and provide support for the notion that the AHI is a useful self-report instrument for the assessment of happiness.