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 religious and social psychological dimensions and is therefore divided into two subscales: the vertical subscale, Religious Well-Being, represents God-related well-being; and the horizontal subscale, Existential Well-being, focuses on meaning and life satisfaction. Each scale contains 10 short statements to which the respondent expresses a level of agreement.

Length of completion

The entire questionnaire takes 10-15 minutes to complete.

Individualized feedback for the respondent

The respondent receives information about the level of his/her overall spiritual well-being, or well-being in a religious sense, or existential well-being.

Keywords

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

Scoring and interpretation

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

Response Scale

Subjects respond on a six-point Likert scale ranging from “Strongly Agree” (1) to “Strongly Disagree” (6).

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