Evaluation of Domain Satisfaction Measure in Cross-National Perspective: Evidence from Austria and Four Countries of the Former Yugoslavia

Abstract

© 2018, Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature. Previous studies have rarely examined the cross-national equivalence of instruments aimed at assessing domain-specific life satisfaction. The present study evaluated the cross-national measurement invariance of the Personal Wellbeing Index-Adult (PWI-A), an instrument designed to measure levels of satisfaction with seven domains of life: standard of living, health, achieving in life, relationships, safety, community-connectedness, and future security. In addition, we investigated (a) the mean country differences in both global and domain-specific satisfaction; (b) the contribution of domain satisfactions to global life satisfaction across countries; (c) the associations between both individual domains and the total PWI-A score with measures of global life satisfaction. A total sample consisted of 1153 undergraduate students (age range 18–35 years) from five European countries: Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia. The results provided support for the full scalar invariance of the PWI-A across countries. Satisfactions with standard of living, achieving in life, and personal relationships were significant predictors of global life satisfaction in each country. Significant differences in global life satisfaction, and satisfactions with standard of living, safety, community, and future security were found between the countries. Strong correlations between the total PWI-A score and measures of global life satisfaction (r range from.58 to.83) obtained across all five countries support the use of the total PWI-A score as an indicator of overall life satisfaction. In sum, our findings support the use of the PWI-A as a measure of domain-specific life satisfaction in a cross-national perspective.