Swedish Translation of Four-Item Work-Life Balance Scale Passes Key Psychometric Tests

A four-item questionnaire that asks people a deceptively simple question — how well do work and the rest of your life fit together? — has now been carefully translated into Swedish and put through a battery of statistical tests, and it has largely passed. In a study published in BMC Psychology, researchers led by Frida Degerstedt and Elin Granholm Valmari at Umeå University report that the Swedish version of the Work-Life Balance Scale shows good internal consistency, supports the original single-factor structure, and correlates with occupational balance and mental health in exactly the ways theory predicts. For a country that has long made work-life balance a matter of national policy, the arrival of a validated Swedish instrument is more consequential than it might first appear.

Work-life balance is not the same thing as working fewer hours or splitting time fifty-fifty. The researchers are careful to define it as an individual’s overall, subjective appraisal of how well work and non-work activities fit together in relation to current priorities and opportunities for growth. Someone who works long hours but finds the arrangement satisfying and aligned with their goals can genuinely perceive balance, while someone with a lighter schedule may feel deeply out of sync. This distinguishes the construct from related theories in organizational psychology, such as work-family conflict, which focuses on incompatible demands between roles, and work-family enrichment, which describes how resources gained in one domain can benefit another. The spillover-crossover model adds a further layer, describing how experiences and emotions travel between work and home within one person, and even between partners and family members.

The scale at the heart of the new study was developed by Paula Brough and colleagues, who designed a concise four-item measure based on people’s global subjective evaluation of the balance between work and non-work activities. Unlike conflict measures, which ask whether demands in one domain interfere with functioning in another, the scale asks respondents to judge the perceived balance itself, and it was built to apply regardless of marital or parental status. In the original validation across four heterogeneous samples of workers in Australia and New Zealand, the one-factor structure and internal consistency held up, and work-life balance was associated in expected directions with work demands, job and family satisfaction, turnover intentions, and psychological strain, with several associations replicated over time. What was missing was any Swedish version, which limited researchers and practitioners who wanted a brief, well-grounded measure for large work-life health studies in Sweden.

Producing one required far more than dictionary work. The team followed the ISPOR guidelines for cross-cultural validation of instruments, a staged process designed to protect conceptual equivalence rather than literal wording. Two native Swedish speakers produced independent forward translations after being briefed on the constructs, the target population, and the purpose of the instrument, and they were explicitly instructed to prioritize culturally appropriate meaning over word-for-word fidelity. Their versions were reconciled item by item into a single draft, which was then translated back into English by two researchers who had not been involved in the forward translation. The back translations served as a diagnostic mirror, revealing ambiguities or unintended shifts in meaning, and a harmonization review compared the preliminary Swedish version, the original English scale, and both back translations across every item, instruction, and response alternative.

The most revealing stage was cognitive debriefing, in which eight Swedish-speaking participants — police officers, civilians working within the police authority, and a public order officer — completed the draft version and were asked to think aloud about their understanding of the instructions, items, key terms, and response alternatives. Their feedback caught several expressions that were technically correct but felt unnatural in Swedish. The wording corresponding to “I believe” in the final item was judged overly literal and revised to emphasize the respondent’s subjective experience of balance, while the phrase corresponding to “about right” was replaced with a more idiomatic formulation. Interestingly, participants suggested removing the temporal and summary expressions corresponding to “currently” and “overall,” but the researchers declined, judging those words to be meaningful components of the original items and essential to preserving conceptual equivalence with the source instrument.

With the adapted scale finalized, the team turned to psychometric evaluation using survey data from 215 students — 173 in police education programs at three universities and 42 in an educational program within the Swedish Prison and Probation Service. Because the respondents were students, the questionnaire opened with the clarification that “if you are a student, work means your studies.” Items are rated on a five-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree, with one negatively worded item reverse-coded before scoring. The mean scale score came out at 3.85 on the five-point range, with a standard deviation of 0.85, and all four items used the full response range. Internal consistency was good, with Cronbach’s alpha of 0.83 and McDonald’s omega of 0.86, comfortably above the 0.70 threshold conventionally regarded as acceptable.

Not every item performed equally, however, and the study is unusually candid about this. The scale’s single reverse-worded item showed a corrected item-rest correlation of just 0.39, compared with 0.75 to 0.79 for the three positively worded items, and removing it would have pushed alpha up to 0.91. In the confirmatory factor analysis, which treated the items as ordinal indicators and used diagonally weighted least squares estimation, the positively worded items loaded strongly at 0.88 to 0.96 while the reverse-worded item loaded at only 0.49. The model’s overall fit was mixed but generally acceptable, with an SRMR of 0.01, an RMSEA of 0.07, and CFI and TLI values of 1.0, though the scaled chi-square test reached significance. The researchers note that reverse-worded items can introduce method variance by forcing respondents to shift response direction, raising the risk of cognitive burden or misinterpretation — and the same item also performed comparatively weakly in the original validation, a pattern consistent with, though not proof of, a wording-related effect.

Crucially, the team chose not to simply delete the problem item, even though doing so would have improved the reliability statistics. Dropping it would have altered the original four-item measure, and a three-item version has never been independently validated. Instead, they recommend that Swedish users retain all four items and the original scoring to preserve comparability, while reporting item-level performance and interpreting the reverse-worded item cautiously. Future studies, they suggest, could directly compare the reverse-worded item with a semantically equivalent positively worded alternative, or apply item response theory in larger and more occupationally diverse samples to clarify whether all four items contribute distinct information across the balance continuum.

The validity evidence was otherwise encouraging. Work-life balance correlated strongly and positively with occupational balance, measured with the Swedish-born Occupational Balance Questionnaire, at r = .76 — supporting convergent validity, though the magnitude also reveals substantial overlap between the two constructs and raises questions about how distinct they really are. The scale also behaved as theory predicts in relation to mental health: higher work-life balance was associated with lower depressive symptoms on the PHQ-9 (r = −.54) and lower anxiety symptoms on the GAD-7 (r = −.45), both statistically significant and of at least moderate magnitude. These findings echo the original validation, in which higher work-life balance predicted lower psychological strain both cross-sectionally and longitudinally, and they extend the evidence to more specific indicators of psychological distress.

The authors are clear about the limits. The sample consisted of students in professional education rather than employees exposed to long-term occupational demands, which may explain why 15.8 percent of participants hit the maximum score, producing a modest ceiling effect that could limit the scale’s ability to distinguish people at the upper end of balance. The cross-sectional design cannot establish whether low balance causes distress or the reverse, and no data were collected on test-retest reliability, measurement invariance, responsiveness, or predictive validity. The translation process also involved no bilingual professionals or translation agency, leaving open the possibility of translator-related bias despite the systematic procedure. Still, the study delivers what it promised: a brief, carefully adapted Swedish measure with promising initial psychometric properties, ready to be embedded in larger surveys of health, work ability, and working conditions — and, with further validation in broader working populations, potentially a small but powerful tool for understanding one of the defining tensions of modern working life.

Subject of Research: Translation and psychometric validation of the Swedish Work-Life Balance Scale

Article Title: Translation, cross-cultural adaptation, and psychometric evaluation of the Swedish Work-Life Balance Scale

Article References: Degerstedt, F., Bellander, S., Ingrell, J., Tedeholm, P. G., Nordin, T., & Granholm Valmari, E. (2026). Translation, cross-cultural adaptation, and psychometric evaluation of the Swedish Work-Life Balance Scale. BMC Psychology, 14(1), Article 1462. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05752-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05752-3

Keywords: work-life balance, psychometrics, cross-cultural adaptation, scale validation, internal consistency, confirmatory factor analysis, occupational balance, depression, anxiety, Sweden, questionnaire translation, occupational psychology