Spiritual Well-being Scale (SWBS)

The Spiritual Well-being Scale (SWBS) is a 20-item self-assessment questionnaire used to measure overall spiritual well-being. The questionnaire captures both the religious and social psychological dimensions, and is therefore divided into two subscales: the vertical subscale – Religious Well-Being represents well-being related to God; and the horizontal subscale – Existential Well-being focuses on the meaning of life and life satisfaction. Each scale contains 10 short statements to which the respondent expresses the degree of agreement.

Length of filling

Filling out the entire questionnaire will take 10-15 minutes.

Individualized feedback for the respondent

The respondent obtains information about the level of his overall spiritual well-being, or well-being in the religious sense of the word, or existential well-being.

Keywords

Spiritual Well-being Scale, SWBS, spiritual well-being, religious well-being, existential well-being, well-being

Scoring and interpretation

The total score is obtained by adding the points for the individual items. In the Czech version, positively worded items (3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14, 15, 17, 19 and 20) are reverse scored. A higher overall score therefore corresponds to a lower level of spiritual well-being and ranges from 20-120. It is also possible to separately obtain a score for the Religious Well-Being subscale by summing the odd-numbered items and a score for the Existential Well-Being subscale by summing the even-numbered items.

Response scale

Subjects answer on a six-point Likert scale from “Strongly agree” (1) to “Strongly disagree” (6).

Cut-off

No.

Czech standards

No.

References

Bufford, R. K., Paloutzian, R. F., & Ellison, C. W. (1991). Norms for the Spiritual Weil-Being Scale. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 19(1), 56–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/009164719101900106

Ellison, C. W. (1983). Spiritual Well-Being: Conceptualization and Measurement. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 11(4), 330–338. https://doi.org/10.1177/009164718301100406

Paloutzian, R.F. et al. (2021). The Spiritual Well-Being Scale (SWBS): Cross-Cultural Assessment Across 5 Continents, 10 Languages, and 300 Studies. In: Ai, A.L., Wink, P., Paloutzian, R.F., Harris, K.A. (eds) Assessing Spirituality in a Diverse World. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52140-0_17

Spiritual Well-being Scale. (2023). WESTMONT. Retrieved March 27, 2023, from https://www.westmont.edu/psychology/raymond-paloutzian-spiritual-wellbeing-scale

Tavel, P., Sandora, J., Furstova, J., Lacev, A., Husek, V., Puzova, Z., Polackova Solcova, I., & Malinakova, K. (2021). Czech Version of the Spiritual Well-Being Scale: Evaluation and Psychometric Properties. Psychological Reports, 124(1), 366–381. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033294119898117