تحلیل عاملی تأییدی مقیاس رضایت از زندگی دانش آموزان چند بعدی

The assessment of children’s life satisfaction (LS) is a relatively new area of research. To date, one of the most comprehensive investigations in this area has culminated in the development of the Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale [MSLSS; Huebner, E. S. (1994). Preliminary development and validation of a multidimensional life satisfaction scale for children. Psychological Assessment, 6, 149–158]. The first multidimensional scale of its kind, the MSLSS assesses children’s subjective perceptions of LS in five conceptually relevant domains: Family, Friends, School, Self, and Living Environment. Initial investigations of its psychometric properties and relationships to theoretically related variables have supported the validity and reliability of the MSLSS. The present study builds upon this past research by assessing the relative goodness-of-fit of the MSLSS using confirmatory factor analytic procedures by means of the SPSS LISREL statistical package. Subjects were 314 children in Grades 3–8. Results of the analyses and their implications for the reliability and validity of the MSLSS are discussed.

The psychological construct of subjective well-being (SWB) has received much attention in the past two decades. Current research has yielded robust support for a tripartite model of subjective well-being in which three interrelated yet separate factors have emerged: Positive Affect, Negative Affect, and Life Satisfaction (LS) (Andrews and Withey, 1976; Campbell et al., 1976; Diener, 1984; Emmons and Diener, 1985). The subjective perception of LS differs from the other two factors in that it involves a cognitive judgement rather than the evaluation of affect. Although areas such as marriage, work, and aging have received the lion’s share of attention in SWB research, in recent years a handful of researchers have begun to examine the structure of SWB in childhood. Similar to our own findings, Huebner (1994)found only two measures of children’s LS in his review of the literature. One measure was the Perceived Life Satisfaction Scale (Adelman et al., 1989). An investigation of this scale by Huebner and Dew (1993)found limited psychometric data for the measure, as well as difficulty in interpreting the factor structure of the scale (Huebner and Dew’s results yielded four primary factors as opposed to the unidimensional factor structure assumed by the authors of the measure). Furthermore, the scale was designed only for children who have reached adolescence and thus would not be appropriate for younger children. The second scale which Huebner found was the Student’s Life Satisfaction Scale (SLSS; Huebner, 1991a). This seven-item measure of global LS was developed for use in large scale surveys of children’s (Grades 3 to 8) well-being. Although the scale was found to have a unidimensional factor structure (Huebner, 1991a; Dew and Huebner, 1994), the results of one study (Huebner, 1991b) indicated that preadolescent students were able to differentiate among specific domains in their lives, in terms of perceived LS. However, because of the inherent shortcomings of single-item scales (e.g. Diener, 1984), it was apparent that the SLSS would not suffice as a multidimensional scale of LS for children.