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Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine the comparative utility and reliability of the LSES in measuring life satisfaction in elderly residents in comparable samples of Great Britain (GB) and United States (US) nursing home residents. Included in the study were 100 residents from 15 GB nursing homes and 207 residents from 10 US nursing homes. As well as an overall measure of life satisfaction, the LSES gives a multidimensional portrait of 8 dimensional subscales. The LSES proved convenient and user-friendly to administer by the trained interviewers in a one-to-one verbal administration fashion and a novel method of handling the 5-point Likert scaling was found successful. Results indicated no significant differences between the samples on the relevant demographic variables. Reliabilities on the original 8 factor scale were high for the overall scales with Cronbach Alpha reliability coefficients of .92 for the US sample and .90 for the GB sample. A Lisrel approach was used to determine the best fitting scale. Subsequent analysis compared the scale across the two countries. The results revealed a shorter five-factor scale which was invariant across GB and US samples and which is well adjusted to measuring life satisfaction in nursing home residents.
