Antonovsky's concept sense of coherence (SOC) has gained much attention during the last few years as an important factor in the understanding of social factors behind health and illness. The questionnaire developed to measure SOC may, however, for practical reasons be difficult to use. In a recently conducted population survey in Sweden, we were faced with the problem of incorporating the ideas behind SOC without being able to include the 29-item instrument. Instead, 3 questions were constructed in order to capture each of the 3 dimensions included in SOC, namely manageability, meaningfulness and comprehensibillity. In this research note we present our simplified version of SOC and the properties of the measure obtained. We conclude that the simplified measure we have suggested might be a useful substitute for the original scale, especially In cases where information on SOC would otherwise have been totally omitted.