Studies in the area of psychology have turned to examining the role of life satisfaction in the adjustment of people in life stages other than adulthood, as a reflection of society and the changes it has experienced. Research that initially focused on adults (e.g., Solomon & Winfield, 1945) was extended to adolescents and children in the 1970s and 1980s (see Daly & Carpenter, 1985; Lessing, 1972). A search made by the authors in the PsycNET database indicates that more than 6000 articles on life satisfaction have been published up to 2016, but only a quarter of them focus on adolescents (13–17 years) and schoolchildren (6–12 years).
Satisfaction with life can be defined as the overall assessment of quality of life made by people according to their own criteria (Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999; Huebner, 1994) or as a cognitive response referring to evaluative judgments of satisfaction with life as a whole or in its multiple dimensions (Lucas, Diener, & Suh, 1996). This definition somehow implies the cognitive and emotional ability to consider and weigh several different sources of information.
For Lucas, Diener, and Suh (1996), satisfaction with life is (along with positive and negative affect) one of the dimensions of subjective well-being that refers to the frequency of positive or negative feelings. In other studies, however, the concepts of satisfaction with life and subjective or general well-being are usually superimposed or interchangeable (Cheung & Lucas, 2015; Kuppens, Realo, & Diener, 2008; Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005; Pavot & Diener, 2008; Poletto & Koller, 2011).
Studies on school-age children and adolescents have found associations between satisfaction with life and vulnerability and discrimination (Gilligan & Huebner, 2002; Poletto & Koller, 2011), school environment (Gilligan & Huebner, 2002; Poletto & Koller, 2011), work (Arteche & Bandeira, 2003), and an individual’s network of relationships (Serafini & Bandeira, 2011). Satisfaction with life has also been associated with perceptions of support from teachers (Guess & McCane-Bowling, 2016) and parents (Jiang, Huebner, & Hills, 2013), as well as satisfaction with the neighborhood (Shin, Morgan, Buhin, Truitt, & Vera, 2010). Satisfaction with life also predicts externalizing and internalizing problems (Gao et al., 2015; Haranin, Huebner, & Suldo, 2007).
Given the multiplicity and diversity of these associations, researchers have proposed models that cover the unidimensionality and multidimensionality of life satisfaction. The unidimensional, general, or global models (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985; Pavot & Diener, 1993; Huebner, 2004) use a single scale to indicate levels of satisfaction with life in general. The multidimensional models (Giacomoni & Hutz, 2008; Huebner, 1994) provide a profile of satisfaction with life in various specific domains.
Proctor, Linley, and Maltby (2009) have reviewed the instruments developed from the unidimensional and multidimensional models to assess life satisfaction. Among the models of the second group, the authors present the Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale (MSLSS) (Huebner, 1994), a 40-item self-report scale designed to provide a profile of life satisfaction within five specific domains (family, friends, school, context, and self) and an overall assessment of general life satisfaction. The MSLSS is applicable for use with students aged 8–18. High indices of internal consistency were reported for each dimension (.82 for family, .85 for school, .85 for friends, .83 for context, and .82 for self) and for the full scale (.92).
Today, the MSLSS is used in different cultures, having been adapted and validated for young people in France (Fenouillet, Heutte, Martin-Krumm, & Boniwell, 2015), Iran (Hatami, Motamed, & Ashrafzadeh, 2010), Turkey (Irmak & Kuruüzüm, 2009), Serbia (Jovanovic & Zuljevic, 2013), and Italy (Zappulla, Pace, Cascio, Guzzo, & Huebner, 2014). The studies of adaptation for these countries clearly presented the stages of translation and semantic adaptation, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and reliability indices of the instrument, maintaining the five-dimension structure, with good indices of fit and satisfactory internal consistency values (Cronbach’s alpha greater than .70).
The studies also explored the construct validity of the scale. For convergent validity, instruments were used to measure self-esteem (Jovanovic & Zuljevic, 2013; Zappulla et al., 2014), self-concept (Zappulla et al., 2014), positive relationships with others (Zappulla et al., 2014), positive affect (Jovanovic & Zuljevic, 2013), and other instruments of life satisfaction (Fenouillet et al., 2015; Irmak & Kuruüzüm, 2009). For divergent validity, instruments were used to measure depression (Fenouillet et al., 2015; Jovanovic & Zuljevic, 2013; Zappulla et al., 2014), mental health (Zappulla et al., 2014), and anxiety and stress (Jovanovic & Zuljevic, 2013).
Giacomoni and Hutz (2008) developed the Multidimensional Life Satisfaction Scale for Children (MLSS-C), a Brazilian instrument, based on the scale originally developed by Huebner (1994), seeking to adapt Huebner multidimensional model to the characteristics of the Brazilian culture. To ensure the ecological validity of the scale, the authors derived the MLSS-C items mainly from interviews conducted with Brazilian children aged 5–12.
The MLSS-C contains 50 items, distributed among six dimensions, including domains of life satisfaction not covered in Huebner’s original model, such as compared-self and non-violence. The self dimension consists of items that describe the self with positive characteristics, such as self-esteem, good mood, the ability to relate, and the ability to show affection. The compared-self dimension groups items characterized by evaluations comparative with peers. The non-violence dimension includes items with content associated with aggressive behaviors. The family dimension includes items that describe a healthy, harmonious, and affectionate family environment and satisfying relationships. Items in the friendship dimension refer to relationships with peers, the level of satisfaction in these relationships, and some indications of leisure, fun, and support. Finally, the school dimension includes items that describe the importance of school, the school environment, interpersonal relationships in this space, and levels of satisfaction with this environment.
Giacomoni and Hutz (2008) investigated the psychometric properties of the MLSS-C. They first conducted an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with a sample of 661 students aged 7–12 (mean 10.6) from public and private schools in Porto Alegre in Rio Grande do Sul. The EFA provided a six-factor structure as the best solution, with factors corresponding to the proposed model. Five dimensions presented internal consistency rates ranging from .82 and .86; only one dimension, non-violence, obtained an index of less than .70 (.66). The total Cronbach’s alpha was .93. In a further study with 230 children, the authors found moderate positive correlations between all dimensions and a measure of self-esteem, as well as moderate negative correlations with measures of depression and anxiety (Giacomoni & Hutz, 2008).
The current evidence of adequate psychometric properties of the MLSS-C indicates that it is worth pursuing the validation process. As part of this process, there is a need to confirm the factorial structure derived from the EFA. Will the six-factor model maintain in a CFA? Given Brazil’s cultural diversity, will data from children in another region fit the same model? These questions guided the present study, which aims to validate the structure of the scale using CFA in a sample of children living in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. The sample participated in a broader prospective study from the fifth to the sixth year of elementary school.
In addition to the factorial validity, other contributions to the construct validity are presented through the study of some indicators of discriminant, convergent, and divergent validity. For the discriminant validity, each dimension’s average variance extracted (AVE) must be compared to its squared correlations with other dimensions in the model (Fornell & Larcker, 1981).
Convergent validity is demonstrated when there are correlations between instruments that measure similar traits or characteristics (Pasquali, 2007). Social skills and self-concept constructs were therefore chosen which (according to the literature) are moderately and positively associated with self, family, school and friendship dimensions of life satisfaction as measured by the MSLSS, an instrument similar to the MLSS-C (Jovanovic & Zuljevic, 2013; Zappulla et al., 2014). The hypotheses for the convergent validity analysis are that the dimensions of life satisfaction will positively correlate with positive self-concept and social skills.
Divergent validity is achieved when no correlations are obtained between the measures (Pasquali, 2007). The hypothesis is that life satisfaction will not correlate with stress symptoms, since it is described as a different construct not associated with life satisfaction, as indicated by Jovanovic and Zuljevic (2013).
Test-retest consistency, or stability, was assessed to verify the reliability of the instrument, as well as the internal consistency of the various dimensions of the MLSS-C using Cronbach’s Alpha (α) and composite reliability (CR).