Building a dissatisfaction with life scale

• Grant number: 15/26776-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: March 01, 2016
• End date: February 28, 2017
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Fundamentals and Assessments in Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Cristian Zanon
• Grantee: Barbara Leme
• Host Institution: Universidade São Francisco (USF). Campus Itatiba. Itatiba , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 15/05741-4 - Local independence evaluation and the use of anchoring-vignettes on the satisfaction with life scale, AP.JP

Abstract

This plan aims to develop a scale to assess dissatisfaction with life. The idea is to create items addressing the same aspects of life satisfaction scale, but with negative content. It is possible that the endorsement of negative items is lower than the positive ones. So the scale of dissatisfaction of Life, together with the Life Satisfaction Scale, might produce studies to evaluate how is the response process of life satisfaction items. The objective of this project is to conduct a survey of articles on the Life Satisfaction Scale and build items to assess dissatisfaction with life. For this we will create 5 items on dissatisfaction with life and these items will undergo semantic evaluation of three judges on the symmetry of these items with the life satisfaction scale. Subsequently, these items will be presented to two focus groups of three students who will assess the understanding of these items. Finally, the final version of Life Dissatisfaction Scale will be applied to 200 university along with the Life Satisfaction Scale (the order of these scales will be changed in each questionnaire) and the Big Five Inventory that assesses personality. Factor analyzes will be conducted for each scale and then a factor analysis with the two scales to evaluate the one-dimensionality of the construct. These analyzes will produce information on the importance of each item to the factor (factor loading) and indicate the amount of variance that positive and negative items explain the construct. Finally, correlations of the scales of satisfaction and dissatisfaction of life with personality factors will be carried out to assess if the content of (positive or negative), somehow alters the pattern of correlations. Finally, the correlational comparisons will be performed (satisfaction / dissatisfaction with personality factors) than through the Fisher method (z), to assess whether the positive content of scale differs statistically significant correlations of negative content of scale.