Psychology Spiritual Well-being Scale

INTRODUCTION

A long-standing human concern is the assessment of the quality of peoples' lives.  During the past 40 years, techniques to measure quality of life (QOL) have evolved and become more sophisticated.  Early measures focused on QOL as understood in a physical sense.  This included tangible or countable goods, events, or services.  Examples of such measures included crime rate, standard of living, income level, or frequency of visits to a physician.

An outgrowth of this QOL movement was the development of measures of the quality-of-life experience.  The emphasis here is on the assessment of the quality of the subjective experience of life, rather than on tangible or countable goods or events per se.  Such measures are based on the premise that a person's quality of life also involves his or her experience of it (Campbell, 1976).  Measures of well-being and loneliness evolved out of this line of work (Diener, 1984).

AUTHORS

Raymond F. Paloutzian is professor emeritus of psychology, Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California.  He received his Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate School, and was visiting professor at Stanford University and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.  He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and its divisions on International Psychology, the Psycholgical Study of Social Issues, Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, General Psychology, and is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.  He was editor of the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion for 18 years, from 1998 to 2016.

Craig W. Ellison was professor emeritus of counseling and urban studies at Alliance Theological Seminary in Nyack, New York.  He received his Ph.D. from Wayne State University, wrote numerous articles and several books, and edited several books.  His research and practice focused on interpersonal trust, loneliness, and spiritual well-being.  Although deceased in 2012, he leaves a long shadow of admiration.

SPIRITUAL WELL-BEING SCALE

Ray Paloutzian and his friend and colleague Craig W. Ellison developed the Spiritual Well-Being Scale (SWBS) during the years 1979-1982.  It has since received over 1000 citations, been used or highlighted in over 300 research articles and book chapters, 200 doctoral dissertations and master's theses, 6 books, and 85 posters and presentations.  It has also been translated into 20 languages and variations for use with children and adolescents. 

The Spiritual Well-Being Scale in a variety of languages are available for download a gratis. The SWBS used to be available by purchase from the Life Advance webpage, but now it is available for download and use at no cost. More languages may be added in the future.

Arabic
Cebuano
Chinese
Czech
English 10-item
English Childhood Retrospective
English
Greek
Hindi
Indonesian
Italian
Korean
Malay
Norwegian
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Spanish
Tagalog
Thai
Urdu

Additional Documents:
SWBS Manual
SWBS Selective Bibliography 1979-2005
SWBS Bibliography 1983-2016