ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Quantitative Psychology and Measurement
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1638017
This article is part of the Research TopicAssessing Well-being From the Third World: Psychometric Developments From Non-WEIRD CountriesView all 9 articles
Psychometric evaluation of the Brief Multidimensional Students' Life Satisfaction Scale (BMSLSS) in Chilean early adolescents: An Item Response Theory analysis
Provisionally accepted
- 1Diego Portales University, Santiago, Chile
- 2Facultad de Administración y Economía, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile
- 3Research Institute on Quality of Life (IRQV), Universitat de Girona, Girona, Spain
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Life satisfaction is a core component of subjective well-being (SWB) that contributes significantly to child and adolescent development and outcomes. The Brief Multidimensional Students' Life Satisfaction Scale (BMSLSS; Seligson, Huebner, & Valois, 2003) is one of the most popular measures of life satisfaction in childhood and adolescence. In the present study, we used Samejima's Graded Response Model (GRM) to thoroughly investigate the item response functions, item and total precision, as well as gender and age differential item functioning (DIF) of the BMSLSS in a nationwide cross-sectional sample of n = 5,619 Chilean early adolescents (49.2% girls), aged 10, 11 and 12 years (46.13%, 44.99%, and 8.88% respectively). Conventional psychometric analyses, including item-test correlations, internal consistency, and factor analysis, indicated good overall functioning of the BMSLSS. However, the IRT analysis revealed important nuances in the scale's performance. Specifically, the results advise reviewing the items' response options and exercising caution when interpreting high scores, due to redundancy among lower response categories and insufficient discrimination at the upper end of the life satisfaction spectrum. Furthermore, the analysis detected measurement non-invariance for some items across gender and age. Implications and future directions of research are discussed.
Keywords: Brief Multidimensional Students' Life Satisfaction Scale (BMSLSS), Item responseTheory (IRT), Graded response model (GRM), differential item functioning (DIF), MIMIC model, lifesatisfaction, early adolescents, Chile
Received: 30 May 2025; Accepted: 27 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Gempp and Carrasco. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Rene Gempp, Diego Portales University, Santiago, Chile
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