Promoting Mental Health in Adolescents Through Physical Education: Measuring Life Satisfaction for Comprehensive Development

Abstract

Background: Life satisfaction serves as a preventive agent against various emotional, cognitive, and behavioral challenges, making it a crucial cognitive indicator of subjective well-being, particularly during adolescence. Accurately assessing life satisfaction is essential for understanding and promoting adolescent mental health, especially in applied settings such as physical education, which plays a key role in fostering psychological well-being and positive youth development. However, additional investigation is needed to confirm the tools used for this purpose. This study aimed to analyze the psychometric properties, metric invariance, and temporal stability of the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) in adolescents from a region in southeastern Spain. Thus, the present study sought to answer the following research questions: (1) Does the SWLS demonstrate adequate psychometric properties in an adolescent population? (2) Is the SWLS invariant across gender and residential environments? (3) Does the SWLS show adequate stability over time? Methods: A sample of 400 students was assessed using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, multigroup comparisons, and test–retest techniques. Results: The results showed significant differences in scale scores in the sex and demographic location variables. Also, a robust unifactorial model with five items demonstrated good performance in terms of goodness of fit and internal consistency. Furthermore, full metric invariance was observed across genders, while configural invariance was supported for residential environment. Concurrent validity analyses revealed significant associations with another unidimensional well-being measure, and temporal stability was confirmed through the intraclass correlation coefficient. Conclusions: The findings support the SWLS as a potentially valid, reliable, and time-effective tool for assessing adolescent life satisfaction. Its strong psychometric properties make it highly suitable for use in mental health research, longitudinal monitoring, and large-scale studies. Moreover, its ease of administration allows its integration into educational, clinical, community-based, and physical education contexts, offering insightful information for the creation of long-lasting mental health regulations and preventive measures meant to improve the well-being of adolescents. Notwithstanding these encouraging results, some restrictions must be noted. The sample was restricted to a single geographic area, and contextual or cultural factors may have an impact on how satisfied people are with their lives. Furthermore, response biases could have been introduced by using self-report measures.