Context
The single-item version most people encounter is some variant of "All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?" answered on a 0 ("completely dissatisfied") to 10 ("completely satisfied") scale. This question, sometimes called the Cantril Ladder after psychologist Hadley Cantril's 1965 work, is the basis of the Gallup World Poll and the World Happiness Report.
Multi-item versions are more common in clinical and academic work. Diener's Satisfaction With Life Scale uses five questions on a 1 to 7 scale and produces a 5-to-35 score. The advantage of multi-item measures is they reduce the noise of a single rating; the disadvantage is they take longer and are usually only collected once.
The single biggest finding from decades of life-satisfaction research is that the score is more stable than people expect. Major life events (marriage, job loss, even disability) move scores temporarily, but most people return to within a point or two of their pre-event baseline within a year or two — a phenomenon called the hedonic treadmill. The factors that produce durable upward shifts are mostly relational and habitual, not material.
An honest caveat: a single score is sensitive to mood at the moment of rating. People rate their lives higher on sunny days, after a meal, and in better-lit rooms — none of which reflects an actual change in how their life is going. This is part of why repeated measurement over time is more trustworthy than any single rating, and why most serious uses of life satisfaction scores average several waves of data.
How it connects to the Wheel of Life
A life satisfaction score gives you a single headline number; the Wheel of Life gives you the same idea broken down by area. The wheel is more diagnostic — a 6 overall means something different if your Health is at a 9 and Money at a 3 versus the reverse — and it's more actionable, because you can do something about a specific sphere in a way you can't easily do for an aggregate score.
Related terms
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