Development of the Polish-Language Riverside Life Satisfaction Scale and Its Further Validation

Abstract

This article presents four studies aimed at developing a Polish-language version of the newest measure of life satisfaction, i.e., the English-language Riverside Life Satisfaction Scale (RLSS), and efforts towards its further validation. The pre-final Polish version of the RLSS (RLSS-PL) established in Study 1 was subsequently investigated in three online validation studies. In these studies, we replicated the findings obtained by the authors of the original RLSS regarding the unidimensionality of RLSS-PL and its high internal consistency. We also determined the correlations between the RLSS-PL and other measures including life satisfaction, affect balance, positive and negative affect, psychological well-being, subjective happiness, personality traits, values, socially desirable responding, awareness of the research hypothesis, and demographic characteristics. Further validation of the RLSS-PL involved our establishing correlations between the RLSS-PL and previously unanalyzed psychological constructs such as social and emotional well-being, gratitude, self-esteem, positive orientation, and mindfulness. In addition, we have determined the test-retest stability of the RLSS-PL over three-month and six-month intervals. The findings provided evidence that the RLSS-PL is a unidimensional, valid, reliable, and stable measure of life satisfaction in reference to the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS).

Acknowledgments

We would like to warmly thank Megan Williams from Appalachian State University (USA) for her initial proofreading of the very first draft of the manuscript, done on an entirely voluntary basis and for no compensation.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. The work described in the submitted manuscript has also been carried out in accordance with the Polish Code of Professional Ethics for Psychologist.

Table 5. Correlations between the Polish Riverside life satisfaction scale (RLSS-PL) and demographics in each study.

Notes

1 The data and R codes needed to reproduce the analyses presented in this paper can be found at https://osf.io/j386f/. None of the three studies were pre-registered.

2 The back-translation of the Polish RLSS can be found at https://osf.io/j386f/.