Well-Being

The Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS; Diener et al., 1985) is a short, five-item instrument that was designed to measure global cognitive judgments of satisfaction with one's life. The format of the questionnaire was modified after reported methodological constraints in assessing centenarians who described their difficulties in understanding self-referent statements and using five or six answering categories (Jopp and Rott, 2006). To avoid these difficulties, the questionnaire was changed from statements to questions, with a response of 0 being no, 1 being in between, and 2 being yes.

The Positive Valuation of Life Scale (Positive VOL; Lawton et al., 2001) is a 13-item scale that was formulated to examine the factors that may influence a person's will to continue to live and affect end-of-life attitudes and behaviors. In the Portuguese version used in this study, two factors were identified: existential beliefs and perceived control (Araújo et al., 2015). The answering format was changed from five to three options (0 = no, 1 = in between, and 2 = yes) due specific difficulties in assessing centenarians (see Jopp and Rott, 2006).