Is Life Satisfaction a Better Single-Question Measure of Well-Being?

How should researchers ask people how their lives are going?

A new paper, published in Applied Research in Quality of Life, compares two widely used ways of measuring subjective well-being with a single survey question.

One question asks about life satisfaction: “Overall, how satisfied are you with life as a whole these days?” Respondents answer on a scale from 0, meaning “Not at all satisfied with your life,” to 10, meaning “Completely satisfied with your life.”

The other question is Cantril’s ladder, sometimes referred to as a measure of life evaluation. It asks people to imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top, where the top represents the best possible life and the bottom represents the worst possible life. Respondents are then asked where they feel they stand at the present time.

The paper, by Padgett, Felton, Case, Lomas, Johnson, and VanderWeele, uses data from Wave 1 of the Global Flourishing Study, a large cross-national study that includes more than 200,000 participants across 22 countries and territories.

The authors compared how strongly each of these two questions was correlated with other indicators of flourishing. These included happiness, physical and mental health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, and financial and material stability.

Across the 22 countries examined, life satisfaction had a stronger average correlation with the other flourishing indicators than Cantril’s ladder did. This pattern also held across all six flourishing domains examined in the study. Even for financial and material stability, where the authors had expected Cantril’s ladder might show stronger correlations, life satisfaction was slightly stronger on average across countries.

The authors note that single-item measures are inherently limited. No single question can capture the full breadth of human flourishing. Still, large surveys often rely on short measures, especially when asking many questions across large populations.

The study adds evidence that the wording of a well-being question can shape what it captures. In this analysis, asking people how satisfied they are with life as a whole appeared to be more closely connected with a broader set of flourishing indicators than asking them to place their life on a ladder.

Learn more about measures used to assess human flourishing.