Developing and Validating a Short Scale Assessing Generic Life Skills

Life psychology is an integrative framework theory centered on how individuals employ their generic life skills in handling everyday life tasks and reaching life goals. Indeed, the theory relates to the accelerating complexity of contemporary globalized societies and how we need generic life skills in order to successfully navigate through a fluid and dynamic context. Within the theory of life psychology, ten life skills have been identified and these are categorized into (1) participation in life, (2) realistic attunement, and (3) perspective taking. The present paper describes the development and validation of a new measure tapping into these three categories as well as an overall aggregated dimension of life skills. Our analyses indicate that the scale holds a solid factor structure. Furthermore, convergent validity was established through the related concepts of self-determination and self-efficacy, and predictive validity was examined in relation to life satisfaction. Our scale holds great implications in regard to developing the empirical foundation for research in the field of life psychology.