[A closer look at the Scale for Subjective Well-being of the Elderly]

The Dutch Scale for Subjective Well-being of the Elderly (SSWO, 30 items) is a reliable and valid measure of well-being of the elderly. In this article, this instrument is subjected to a psychometric evaluation. First, as it is known that the SSWO has a weak subscale 'SSWO-Contacts', a new and reliable subscale 'SSWO-Contacts' was developed. Four SSWO-items were replaced by six items from an existing and valid Loneliness-scale. Cronbach's alpha for the new subscale increased from .61 to .86. This also led to a slight increase in reliability of the new SSWO (32 items) as a whole from .88 to .90. Secondly, the hierarchical order of the items in the SSWO-subscales was tested with a Mokken-scaling procedure. Of the five subscales, four showed a (weak to rather strong) hierarchy. Thirdly, a short version (8 items) was developed to maximize the possibilities of implementing the SSWO. This short version has 85% of variance in common with the 32-item version. Validity of the SSWO-32 and SSWO-8 was explored by correlating the instruments with measures of health and personality. All expected relations were found. Also, the newly developed instruments proved to be reliable measures in a dataset of 119 elderly persons. The SSWO-32 is recommended for the investigation of specific dimensions of well-being in elderly people. The SSWO-8 can be used to obtain a quick and global impression of well-being.