Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS)

Subjective Happiness Scale

  • Permission is granted for all non-commercial use, including scholarly/academic.
  • A PDF of the scale can be downloaded here.
  • Available from the first author in the following translations: Bulgarian, Chinese, Croation, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Persian, Peruvian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Scandinavian, Serbian, Sinhala, Slovak, Spanish (European), Spanish (Mexican), Swedish, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Urdu.
  • To score the scale, reverse code the 4th item (i.e., turn a 7 into a 1, a 6 into a 2, a 5 into a 3, a 3 into a 5, a 2 into a 6, and a 1 into a 7), and compute the mean of the 4 items.  Norms are available in the reference below, as well as in many other publications that have used the scale (see PsycInfo).

SCALE IS SHOWN BELOW:

For each of the following statements and/or questions, please circle the point on the scale that you feel is most appropriate in describing you.
1.  In general, I consider myself:
not a very happy person     1            2            3            4            5            6            7     a very happy person
2.  Compared with most of my peers, I consider myself:
less happy    1            2            3            4            5            6            7    more happy
3.  Some people are generally very happy.  They enjoy life regardless of what is going on, getting the most out of everything.  To what extent does this characterization describe you?
not at all    1            2            3            4            5            6            7    a great deal
4.  Some people are generally not very happy.  Although they are not depressed, they never seem as happy as they might be.  To what extent does this characterization describe you?
not at  all   1            2            3            4            5            6            7    a great deal