Surveying Validity and Reliability of Satisfaction with Life Scale in Students

The purpose of this paper is to determine reliability (internal consistency) and validity of satisfaction with life scale in two samples of Iranian students. The first sample was composed of 866 persons (490 females and 376 males) with average age of 22.60 while the second one was composed of 300 persons (131 females and 169 males) with average age of 20.87. All the subjects were asked to answer to satisfaction with life scale. Subjects in the second group replied to emotional balance, social welfare, and psychological welfare scales along with answering to satisfaction with life scale. Conformity and exploratory factor analysis, t-test for independent groups, and correlation analysis with Bonferroni modification were used for data analysis. A factor was extracted by exploratory factor analysis. The resulted factor defined 63.40 variance for scores. Conformity factor analysis supports SWLS single-factor structure. There was positive correlation between this scale and other scales of welfare while its alpha coefficient was equal to 0.87. finally, reliability for scale retest was 0.92. Findings showed that this scale has single-factor structure and appropriate validity and reliability. Therefore it could be applied for Iranian samples