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The Cuban population is going through a process of demographic change and accelerated aging, which, together with a difficult economic situation, places the older adults in a complex economic reality, especially in the most vulnerable communities. This paper aims to analyze the housing situation of the older adults in a vulnerable community in Santiago de Cuba during a period of particular economic difficulty.

The study analyzes the housing situation of a sample of people over 60 years of age (n = 325) in a vulnerable community in the city of Santiago de Cuba. A structured interview was used for data collection.

The results show that most of the people over 60 years of age interviewed considered their homes to be in a poor state of repair. A significant part of the homes were built with precarious materials and had cracked walls, leaks, problems with the functioning of the toilet, broken pipes, etc. In addition, most of the houses were poorly equipped, with a large number of them lacking refrigerators, cell phones or computers or other electrical appliances (heater, shower, stove, etc.). Women, people with black skin and people over 75 years of age were in a particularly precarious housing situation.

Demographic changes and the expected aging of the population in Cuba mean that meeting the needs of the older adults is expected to become increasingly complex. The design of public policies and administrative management should take into consideration the housing needs of people over 60 years of age in vulnerable communities, with special attention to women, racialized people and older adults.

The research was conducted based on the information provided by a particularly vulnerable group in Cuba (older adults), about which there is limited information available, and the data were collected during a particularly challenging time for the Cuban economy: the post-COVID-19 pandemic period. The challenges of conducting research of this nature in Cuba and the period during which data collection took place form the basis of the originality of this manuscript.

This study attempted to measure life satisfaction and developed a scale to measure its dimensions with the required psychometric properties (validity and reliability). In today’s scenario, organizations are focusing on life satisfaction by helping employees to maintain their work-life balance. Therefore, this paper aims to develop a robust scale of life satisfaction.

The methodology consists of three broad stages: item generation, scale development, and validity. Using the sample of 198 working executives, this study used the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and concluded the four dimensions of life satisfaction: work satisfaction, family satisfaction, societal satisfaction and self-satisfaction.

The results provide academicians and practitioners with new insight and dimensions of life satisfaction. The result of this study shows that life satisfaction has societal satisfaction, family satisfaction, job satisfaction and self-satisfaction dimensions.

This study will provide practitioners with new dimensions to measure life satisfaction. They can help employees achieve life satisfaction across four different factors. This will enable more employee satisfaction, an increase in retention rate and an increase in employee performance. Furthermore, this study provides implications from a policy perspective to design the business policy by considering life satisfaction as an important part of formulating and implementing human resource policies.

This study is unique in terms of exploring the dimensions of life satisfaction in a structured manner and establishing the psychometric properties as construct, content, and criterion validity along with reliability. This scale can be further used in future research to measure the life satisfaction construct.