The Global Flourishing Study: Study Profile and Initial Results on Flourishing

doi:10.21203/rs.3.rs-5312412/v1

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The Global Flourishing Study: Study Profile and Initial Results on Flourishing

https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-5312412/v1

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The Global Flourishing Study is a longitudinal panel study of over 200,000 participants in 22 geographically and culturally diverse countries, spanning all six populated continents, with nationally representative sampling, and intended annual longitudinal panel data collection for five years on numerous aspects of flourishing and its determinants. A description of the study, design, survey development, sampling procedures, and participant characteristics is provided. We report relations between a composite flourishing index and numerous demographic characteristics including age, gender, education, marital status, employment, religious affiliation and service attendance, immigration status, and race/ethnicity. We also report results of multivariate regression analyses on how flourishing is associated with numerous aspects of childhood experiences assessed retrospectively. Analyses are presented both through pooled meta-analysis, and individually by country, and discussion is given as to how the demographic and childhood relationships vary by country and which patterns appear to be universal versus culturally-specific. Brief comment is also given on the results of a whole series of papers in the Global Flourishing Study Special Collection, employing similar analyses, but with more specific aspects of well-being. The Global Flourishing Study expands our knowledge of the distribution and determinants of well-being and provides foundational knowledge for the promotion of societal flourishing.

Health sciences/Risk factors

Scientific community and society/Social sciences/Society

Interest in questions of flourishing has expanded dramatically during the past years. This interest can be seen in sectors ranging from psychology to economics, business, education, medicine, public health, public policy and elsewhere (Seligman, 2011; Huppert and So, 2013; Crespo and Mesurado, 2015; Adler, 2016; VanderWeele, 2017; VanderWeele et al., 2019; Kristjansson, 2019; Trudel-Fitzgerald et al., 2019). While this interest has led to an expansion in knowledge, much with regard to well-being remains unknown, and understudied, especially as pertaining to the global landscape.

Research on well-being has been shaped by Western perspectives and has mostly been carried out in Western contexts. This work has thus been subject to some critique (Lomas, 2022), as indeed is the case with social-scientific research more generally (Henrich, 2010). Such limitations hinder our conceptions of, and knowledge concerning, well-being. The Global Flourishing Study was conceived of as a large open-access 5-year longitudinal panel research study spanning all six populated continents, with nationally representative sampling in each country, to study the distribution and determinants of well-being, to advance our knowledge of flourishing in general and especially in non-Western contexts, and to uncover what patterns are culturally specific and which seem more universal.

The present paper will provide a description of the Global Flourishing Study (GFS) itself, including the nature of the sample and data collection and a description of the methodology for the development of the questionnaire, for study design and survey sampling, and for the analytic approaches guiding many of the initial analyses of the data. Analyses concerning composite assessments of flourishing will be presented as to how such flourishing indices vary across demographic groups and countries, and how various types of childhood experiences relate to adult flourishing. Comment will be offered on a range of other analyses and studies arising out of the first wave of the GFS data, and discussion given of the importance of the study and promotion of flourishing in a global context.

Flourishing is an expansive concept (Keyes, 2002; Seligman, 2011; Huppert and So, 2013; VanderWeele, 2017; Lomas et al., 2024b) and our working definition has been “the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good, including the contexts in which that person lives” (VanderWeele, 2017; VanderWeele and Lomas, 2023). Three aspects of this definition are important. First, flourishing is multidimensional – it concerns all aspects of a person’s life. One may be flourishing in certain ways, but not in others. Second, flourishing is an ideal; it concerns the “relative attainment” of that ideal; we are never perfectly flourishing in this life; there is always room for improvement. Third, flourishing includes the contexts in which a person lives; such contexts include one’s communities and environment. While the terms “flourishing” and “well-being” are often used interchangeably, flourishing arguably has a connotation of also having the environment itself being conducive to growth and being a part of one’s flourishing. One may attain some degree of well-being in a corrupt environment, but one is not fully flourishing because the community or environment is not good. The community’s well-being is a part of one’s own flourishing – a person participates in the common good of the community. Well-being might thus in contrast be defined as “the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good, as they pertain to that individual.” But flourishing includes not only one’s own well-being, but also that of the community.

With concepts so expansive, there is no unique way to partition “all aspects of a person’s life.” Understandably, numerous well-being classifications have thus emerged (Keyes, 2002; Seligman, 2011; Huppert and So, 2013; Su et al., 2014; VanderWeele, 2017). While the GFS included questions from the flourishing conceptualization of VanderWeele (2017), the survey development process (Lomas et al., 2024a) included numerous cross-cultural perspectives and questions extending well beyond those proposed in VanderWeele (2017). In the presentation of the initial GFS results below, we will roughly follow the flourishing domains of VanderWeele (2017) – health, happiness, meaning, character, relationships, financial security. However, the GFS data and analyses do not presuppose the priority of these domains and other researchers can certainly recategorize the items.

These aspects of well-being may be understood as paradigmatic of broader well-being categories: physical well-being, emotional well-being, cognitive well-being, volitional well-being, social well-being, and material well-being (see Table 1). A perhaps simpler division into domains derives from the World Health Organization’s definition (WHO, 1948) of “health” as a “state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being.” The categories used here further divide mental well-being into emotional, cognitive, and volitional well-being, corresponding to traditional and empirical division of the mind into emotions, intellect, and will (Aquinas, 1274/1948; McGrath, 2015; McGrath et al., 2018; Hacker, 2013, 2017, 2021). Social well-being might itself have further been divided in relational and communal well-being; in more expansive understandings of flourishing, communal well-being might itself be sub-divided into community, political, and economic well-being. Again, there is no unique way to divide the conceptual space. Much has been written on including a spiritual dimension within the WHO definition (Peng-Keller et al., 2022) thereby yielding, “a state of complete physical, mental, social, and spiritual well-being,” which we have referred to elsewhere as the WHO+ definition (VanderWeele and Lomas, 2023; Lomas et al., 2023). It is, however, more difficult to attain consensus on understandings of spiritual well-being across the world religions, and we will make some remarks on this matter later in the paper. Material and financial resources are sometimes taken as determinants of well-being, and sometimes understood as constitutive elements of well-being (Aristotle, 4th-C BCE/1925; Stiglitz et al., 2009; Diener and Biswas-Diener, 2011; Lee et al., 2021; Symons and VanderWeele, 2024). These conceptualizations rightly vary depending on how well-being is defined. We do not take a definitive stance on this matter in the paper and present analyses in both ways.

In this paper we will first describe the methodology for the questionnaire development, the sampling and data collection, the measures, and the analytic methods used for both descriptive statistics and evaluation of associations with childhood experiences. We will comment on results of the analyses for a composite flourishing index, and then offer brief comment on numerous papers employing similar methodology applied to more specific aspects of well-being. We conclude by offering discussion on implications for the study and results for the promotion of flourishing.

Questionnaire Development

Development of the questionnaire for the GFS took place over eight distinct phases: (1) selection of core well-being, religion, and demographic questions; (2) solicitation of further well-being, social, political, psychological, economic, community and health questions from domain experts worldwide; (3) feedback and questionnaire refinement from scholars around the world representing numerous academic disciplines on survey questions and structure; (4) input and questionnaire refinement from experts in multicultural survey research and survey translations; (5) feedback and questionnaire refinement from an open invitation to comment on the survey, posted publicly and sent to numerous listservs, with input from over 150 scholars; (6) further questionnaire refinement via input from Gallup’s survey design specialists; (7) adaptation of items from an interviewer-administered to a self-administered survey instrument using best practices for web survey design to minimize item non response, illogical responses and incomplete responses; and (8) confirmation by scholars in several participating countries that translations accurately captured the intended meaning of each question. This was then followed by piloting and cognitive interviews in all of the participating countries. During the translation process, Gallup adhered to the TRAPD model (translation, review, adjudication, pretesting, and documentation) for cross-cultural survey research (ccsg.isr.umich.edu/chapters/translation/overview). See Crabtree et al. (2021/2024) and Lomas et al. (2024a) for more detailed information on the questionnaire development and the refinement of the survey, and survey items, at each stage.

Data

Wave 1 of the Global Flourishing Study data included the following countries and territories: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Egypt, Germany, Hong Kong (Special Administrative Region of China), India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, the Philippines, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Tanzania, Türkiye, United Kingdom, and the United States. See Figure 1. The countries were selected to (a) maximize coverage of the world's population, (b) ensure geographic, cultural, and religious diversity, and (c) prioritize feasibility and existing data collection infrastructure. Data collection was carried out by Gallup Inc. Data for Wave 1 were collected principally during 2023, with some countries beginning data collection in 2022 and exact dates varying by country (Ritter et al., 2024).

Four additional waves of panel data on the participants will be collected annually from 2024-2027. Data from Hong Kong (S.A.R. of China) is available in the first wave of data collection. Data from mainland China were not included in the first data release due to fieldwork delays. The first wave of fieldwork in mainland China began in February 2024, and a second wave is expected to occur in November-December 2024. All wave 1 and 2 data from mainland China will be part of the second dataset release in March 2025. The precise sampling design to ensure nationally representative samples varied by country and further details are available in Ritter et al. (2024) and Padgett et al. (2024a). Survey items included aspects of well-being such as happiness, health, meaning, character, relationships, and financial stability (VanderWeele, 2017), along with other demographic, social, economic, political, religious, personality, childhood, community, health, and well-being variables. Data was also collected concerning retrospective assessments of childhood experiences. The data are publicly available through the Center for Open Science (COS; Johnson et al., 2024, https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/3JTZ8; see also https://www.cos.io/gfs).

Measures

Demographics Variables: Continuous age was classified as 18-24, 25-29, 30-39, 40-49, 50-59, 60-69, 70-79, and 80 or older. Gender was assessed as male, female, or other. Marital status was assessed as single/never married, married, separated, divorced, widowed, and domestic partner. Employment was assessed as employed, self-employed, retired, student, homemaker, unemployed and searching, and other. Education was assessed as up to 8 years, 9-15 years, and 16+ years. Religious service attendance was assessed as more than once/week, once/week, one-to-three times/month, a few times/year, or never. Immigration status was dichotomously assessed with: “Were you born in this country, or not?” Religious tradition/affiliation was captured with the categories of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Sikhism, Baha’i, Jainism, Shinto, Taoism, Confucianism, Primal/Animist/Folk religion, Spiritism, African-Derived, some other religion, or no religion/atheist/agnostic; precise response categories varied by country (Johnson et al., 2023). Racial/ethnic identity was assessed in some, but not all, countries, with response categories varying by country.

Childhood Demographic Variables: Relationship with mother during childhood was assessed with the question: “Please think about your relationship with your mother when you were growing up. In general, would you say that relationship was very good, somewhat good, somewhat bad, or very bad?” Responses were dichotomized to very/somewhat good versus very/somewhat bad. An analogous variable was used for relationship with father. “Does not apply” was treated as a dichotomous control variable for respondents who did not have a mother or father due to death or absence. Parental marital status during childhood was assessed with responses of married, divorced, never married, and one or both had died. Financial status was measured with: “Which one of these phrases comes closest to your own feelings about your family's household income when you were growing up, such as when YOU were around 12 years old?” Responses were lived comfortably, got by, found it difficult, and found it very difficult. Abuse was assessed with yes/no responses to “Were you ever physically or sexually abused when you were growing up?” Participants were separately asked: “When you were growing up, did you feel like an outsider in your family?” Childhood health was assessed by: “In general, how was your health when you were growing up? Was it excellent, very good, good, fair, or poor?” Immigration status was assessed with: “Were you born in this country, or not?” Religious service attendance during childhood was assessed with: “How often did YOU attend religious services or worship at a temple, mosque, shrine, church, or other religious building when YOU were around 12 years old?” with responses of at least once/week, one-to-three times/month, less than once/month, or never. For additional details on the assessments see the GFS codebook (https://osf.io/cg76b) or Crabtree et al. (2024).

Outcome Variable(s): The primary outcome measure in the present paper concerns a composite index for flourishing (VanderWeele, 2017) using two self-report questions in each of six domains: happiness and life satisfaction, physical and mental health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, and financial and material stability. The assessment has received considerable empirical validation in cross-cultural research (Węziak-Białowolska et al., 2019ab; Höltge et al., 2023). Other papers in the Special Collection focus on specific aspects of well-being or its determinants, including numerous questions that are not included in the 12-item composite. Also reported in the Online Supplement are similar analyses to those below but carried out using only the first five domains (excluding financial and material stability), as financial resources are often considered an important determinant of flourishing, rather than a constitutive part of flourishing.

Statistical Analysis

Demographic Analyses: Descriptive statistics for the full sample, weighted to be nationally representative within each country, were estimated for each of the demographic variables. Nationally representative means for the flourishing index were estimated separately for each country and ordered from highest to lowest along with 95% confidence intervals, standard deviations, and Gini coefficients. Variation in means for the flourishing index across demographic categories were estimated, with all analyses initially conducted by country (online supplement). Primary results consisted of a random effects meta-analyses of country-specific flourishing means in each specific demographic category (Borenstein et al., 2010; Hunter & Schmidt, 2000) along with 95% confidence intervals, standard errors, lower and upper limits of a 95% prediction interval across countries, heterogeneity (τ), and I² for evidence concerning variation within a particular demographic variable across countries (Mathur & VanderWeele, 2020). Forest plots of estimates are available in the online supplement. All meta-analyses were conducted in R (R Core Team, 2024) using the metafor package (Viechtbauer, 2010). Within each country, a global test of variation of outcome across levels of each particular demographic variable was conducted, and a pooled p-value (Wilson, 2019) across countries reported concerning evidence for variation within any country. Bonferroni corrected p-value thresholds are provided based on the number of demographic variables (Abdi, 2007; VanderWeele & Mathur, 2019). Religious affiliation/tradition and race/ethnicity were used, when available, as control variables within country, but were not included in the meta-analyses since the availability of these response categories varied by country. See Padgett et al. (2024b) for more extensive description on the analytic methodology for the demographic analyses for this paper and other papers in the Special Collection.

Childhood Predictor Analyses: Descriptive statistics for the observed sample, weighted to be nationally representative within country, were estimated for each childhood demographic category. A weighted linear regression model with complex survey adjusted standard errors was fit within each country of composite flourishing on all of the aforementioned childhood predictor variables simultaneously. In the primary analyses, random effects meta-analyses of the regression coefficients (Borenstein et al., 2010; Hunter & Schmidt, 2000) along with confidence intervals, estimate proportions of effects across countries with effect sizes larger than 0.1 and smaller than -0.1, heterogeneity (τ), and I² for evidence concerning variation within a given demographic category across countries (Mathur & VanderWeele, 2020). Forest plots of estimates are available in the online supplement. Religious affiliation/tradition and race/ethnicity were used within country as control variables, when available, but these coefficients themselves were not included in the meta-analyses since categories/responses varied by country. Within each country, a global test of association of each childhood predictor variable group with outcome was conducted, and a pooled p-value (Wilson, 2019) across countries reported concerning evidence for association within any country. Bonferroni corrected p-value thresholds are provided based on the number of childhood demographic variables (Abdi, 2007; VanderWeele & Mathur, 2019). For each childhood predictor, we calculated E-values to evaluate the sensitivity of results to unmeasured confounding. An E-value is the minimum strength of the association an unmeasured confounder must have with both the outcome and the predictor, above and beyond all measured covariates, for an unmeasured confounder to explain away an association (VanderWeele & Ding, 2017). See Padgett et al. (2024c) for more extensive description on the analytic methodology for the childhood predictor analyses for this paper and other papers in the Special Collection.

Population Weighted Analyses: As supplementary analyses, population weighted meta-analyses were also conducted.

Missing Data: Missing data on all variables was imputed using multivariate imputation by chained equations, and five imputed datasets were used (Rubin, 1996; Acock, 2005; Sterne et al., 2009; van Burren, 2023). To account for variation in the assessment of certain variables across countries (e.g., religious affiliation/tradition and race/ethnicity), the imputation process was conducted separately in each country. This within-country imputation approach ensured that the imputation models accurately reflected country-specific contexts and assessment methods. Sampling weights were included in the imputation models to account for specific-variable missingness that may have been related to probability of inclusion in the study.

Accounting for Complex Sampling Design: The GFS used different sampling schemes across countries based on availability of existing panels and recruitment needs (Ritter et al., 2024). All analyses accounted for the complex survey design components by including weights, primary sampling units, and strata. Additional methodological detail, including accounting for the complex sampling design is provided elsewhere (Padgett et al., 2024a; Ritter et al., 2024).

All analyses were pre-registered with COS prior to data access; all code to reproduce analyses are openly available in an online repository (Padgett et al., 2024d).

Composite Flourishing

Table 2 presents nationally representative descriptive statistics of the observed sample. Slightly more than half were middle aged (30-59 years old [53%]), women (51%), married (52%), employed (either for an employer or self-employed, 57%), and had between 9 and 15 years of education (57%). Most participants were born in the country in which they were surveyed (94%), and approximately one third of participants attended religious services at least weekly (32%). Sample sizes in each country ranged from 1,473 (Turkey) to 38,312 (United States). Participant characteristics for each country are shown in Supplementary Tables S1A to S22A.

Table 3 presents nationally representative descriptive statistics of the observed sample for retrospective assessments of childhood experiences. Most reported “very good” or “somewhat good” relationships with mother (89%) and father (80%); that their parents were married (75%); and that their family “lived comfortably” (35%) or “got by” (41%) financially during their childhood. About 18% of participants reported experiencing abuse and 16% feeling like an outsider growing up; most assessed their health as “excellent” or “very good” (64%) in childhood. A large proportion of participants attended religious services at least once per week during childhood (41%).

With regard to demographic relations and associations with childhood experiences, we will first comment on the meta-analytic results and then turn to variations across countries. Table 4 presents ordered means of composite flourishing index (both with and without financial security), with standard deviations and Gini coefficients. Without financial security, the highest means were reported in Indonesia (8.47), Mexico (8.19), and the Philippines (8.11); and the lowest in Japan (5.91), Turkey (6.59), and the U.K. (6.88). When including financial security, Israel instead of Mexico has the second highest mean. Standard deviations for composite flourishing across countries range from 1.30 to 2.03. Gini coefficients tend to be highest in those countries reporting the lowest means. Cronbach’s alpha for the index is relatively high in all countries. All subsequent tables report results with financial security. Analyses without financial security are given in Online Supplement (S26-S28).

Table 5 presents random effects meta-analysis of composite flourishing means by demographic category. Aggregated across all countries, flourishing increases with age from 7.04 for those aged 18-49 to 7.36 for those aged 80+; it is relatively similar for men and women, but lower for ‘other’ genders. Flourishing is notably higher for those married (7.35) than those separated (6.77) or divorced (6.84); and higher for those employed (7.20) and self-employed (7.28) than those unemployed (6.50). Flourishing tends to increase somewhat with education, but more dramatically with religious service attendance, ranging from mean 6.86 for those never attending to 7.67 for those attending more than weekly. It is slightly higher for those born in the country (7.15) and those not (7.02). Results are generally similar when excluding financial security (Table S26), but the relations with age slightly more muted.

Table 6 presents random effects meta-analysis of multivariate regression of composite flourishing on all childhood predictors simultaneously. Good childhood relationships with mother (0.24; 95% CI:0.16,0.31) and father (0.15; 95% CI:0.09,0.21) were associated with adult flourishing. There is some evidence that having parents who were never married (-0.12; 95% CI:-0.22,-0.02), or when one had died (-0.12; 95% CI:-0.20,-0.03), or possibly divorced (-0.07; 95% CI:-0.17,0.02) was associated with lower adult flourishing. There is a notable gradient in flourishing with childhood subjective financial status, with finding it very difficult associated with lower flourishing (-0.34; 95% CI:-0.39,-0.28) and living comfortably associated with higher flourishing (0.20; 95% CI:0.14,0.26) compared to those who got by; and a similar gradient with self-rated health growing up: poor health being associated with lower (-0.33; 95% CI:-0.53,-0.13) and excellent health with higher (0.46; 95% CI:0.31,0.61) flourishing compared to those in good health. Abuse (-0.34; 95% CI:-0.39,-0.28) or feeling like an outside growing up (-0.25; 95% CI:-0.32,-0.18) were associated with lower adult flourishing. Attending religious services weekly was associated with higher adult flourishing (0.26; 95% CI:0.17,0.36) compared with never attending. Flourishing tended to increase with age, but there was relatively little difference with regard to immigration status, or men vs. women.

Table 7 presents E-value sensitivity analyses of meta-analyzed childhood predictor associations to potential unmeasured confounding. Some of these associations between the childhood predictors and adult flourishing were moderately robust to potential unmeasured confounding. For example, to explain away the association between abuse in childhood with higher adult flourishing, an unmeasured confounder that was associated with both absence of abuse and higher flourishing by risk ratios of 1.68-fold each, above and beyond the measured covariates, could suffice, but weaker joint confounder associations could not; to shift the 95% confidence interval to include the null, an unmeasured confounder that was associated with both absence of abuse and higher adult flourishing by risk ratios of 1.59-fold each, above and beyond the measured covariates, could suffice, but weaker joint confounder associations could not.

Variation Across Countries

The overall patterns above pooled over all countries are illuminating, but disguise important country-specific variation (see Online Supplementary Tables and Figures). Flourishing tends to increase with age in many countries including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Sweden, and the United States, but not in all. In India, Egypt, Kenya, and Japan, patterns are more U-shaped. In Spain, the pattern is U-shaped except for the youngest age-group (18-24 year olds) which report lowest. In Poland and Tanzania, it is mostly decreasing with age. Other countries show more complex patterns with age. Men and women are fairly similar globally, but there are greater differences in certain countries. In Brazil, men report higher flourishing than women (0.39; 95% CI:0.32,0.47); in Japan, women report higher flourishing than men (-0.26; 95% CI:-0.32,-0.21). The pattern of married individuals reporting higher flourishing than those divorced (or separated) are nearly universal, but differences vary from 0.92 (0.63,1.22) in Israel to 0.10 (-0.10,0.30) in Argentina. In most countries those married report notably higher flourishing than those who are single, but not in all: those single report higher flourishing in India (-0.39; 95% CI:-0.50,-0.28) and Tanzania (-0.35; 95% CI:-0.51,-0.20). Those employed effectively universally report higher flourishing than unemployed but again difference vary from 1.50 (95% CI:1.18,1.83) in the United States to just 0.09 (95% CI:-0.03,0.22) in Kenya. However, there is considerable variation across countries in comparisons of employed vs. self-employed, retired, or student, with those self-employed and retired reporting higher flourishing than those employed in many developing countries; and students reporting notably higher flourishing than those employed in Poland, India, Japan, Tanzania, Israel, Egypt, and Kenya. Those attending religious services more than once a week (or weekly) universally report higher flourishing than those never attending but differences vary from 2.33 (2.12,2.54) in Hong Kong to 0.15 (-0.01,0.30) in India. In most countries those with more education report higher flourishing, but the reverse is the case in Hong Kong and Australia. Associations with immigration status also vary by country with those born in the country reporting notably higher flourishing in Philippines, Poland, India, Israel, Mexico, and Hong Kong, whereas the reverse is the case in Spain and Australia.

Likewise, with the analyses concerning the childhood predictors, there are some patterns that are nearly universal and others that seem to vary by culture and context. Associations between good maternal relationship and adult flourishing were nearly universal but varied in magnitude from 0.63 (95% CI:0.27,0.99) in Indonesia to effectively null (-0.14; -0.43,0.14) in Israel; and likewise for good paternal relationship. Compared to those with married parents growing up, those with divorced, separated, single, or one or more deceased parents tended to have lower flourishing in adulthood, though Turkey was an anomaly with respect to divorce. Compared to a subjective financial status of getting by in childhood, living comfortably was essentially universally associated with higher adult flourishing with magnitudes ranging from 0.70 (0.53,0.87) in Hong Kong to effectively null (-0.05; -0.17,0.08) in Nigeria; and finding it very difficult universally associated with lower adult flourishing with magnitudes ranging from -0.92 (-1.45,-0.40) in Turkey to null (0.00; -0.36,-0.35) in Sweden. Experiencing abuse and feeling like an outsider were likewise universally associated with lower adult flourishing. Excellent, as compared to good, childhood health was universally associated with higher adult flourishing, and while poor childhood health was nearly universally associated with lower adult flourishing there were possibly a few exceptions: in Germany there was evidence of a positive association (0.40; 0.07,0.74). Weekly religious service attendance growing up was associated with higher adult flourishing in almost all countries with the largest effect sizes in Poland (1.02; 0.77,1.28) followed by Hong Kong and Turkey; Kenya, South Africa, and Tanzania manifested slightly negative estimates (-0.22, -0.15, -0.05), though with confidence intervals all included 0. Patterns across countries for immigration status, age/birth cohort, and gender roughly followed that reported above for demographic statistics, though after multivariate adjustment, further gender differences emerged, with notable evidence for women having higher flourishing than men in Egypt, Japan, and Hong Kong; and men having higher flourishing than women in Spain, United Kingdom, Brazil, Kenya and Argentina.

Results on Specific Aspects of Flourishing

The analyses presented above concerned composite flourishing. However, just as pooling across countries is of interest, but obscures country-specific relations, so also the use of a composite flourishing measure can obscure more nuanced relations with more specific aspects of well-being. A series of papers, following the same methodology described above, has examined these various more specific well-being domains, and many of these papers are part of the present Global Flourishing Study Special Collection. While these papers contain far more detailed analysis than can possibly be summarized here, some higher level remarks may be of interest in trying to understand similarities and differences in relationships with more specific aspects of well-being. We will provide a cursory overview of some of the results in each of the well-being domains in turn, focusing principally on any patterns that notably diverge from those reported above concerning composite flourishing. Many, albeit not all, of the differences concerns relations with age, gender, and childhood adversity.

Patterns for self-rated physical health (Bradshaw et al., 2024) followed that of composite flourishing in many respects, but differed in that scores decreased with age, though with some variation (e.g. with U-shaped patterns in Australia, Japan, and Sweden); and men report better health than women overall, with the reverse notable only in Japan. Patterns with health limitations (Paltzer et al., 2024) and physical pain (Macchia et al., 2024a) were conversely similar, i.e. increasing in age. Physical pain was one of the very few outcomes that was adversely associated with religious service attendance (Macchia et al, 2024a; Macchia et al., 2024b). For pain, associations with childhood subjective financial status were highly variable across countries, with adverse financial circumstance in some countries predicting lower adult pain (Macchia et al., 2024b). Patterns for self-rated mental health tended to follow those of flourishing, but were U-shaped with age overall, though increasing in Australia, U.S., and Sweden, and decreasing in age in Israel and Tanzania (Okafor et al., 2024). Depression and anxiety, assessed with the PHQ-4, both decreased with age, and were somewhat higher for women than men.

With respect to emotional well-being, patterns for happiness and life satisfaction mostly follow those of flourishing, but also U-shaped with age (Lomas et al., 2024c). In contrast, balance, inner peace, and optimism are all increasing with age (Lomas et al., 2024d; Lomas et al., 2024e). Patterns with mastery are similar but somewhat smaller in magnitude (Kim et al., 2024a). In contrast to many outcomes, suffering is not strongly patterned with age overall, or with religious service attendance, but there is notable variation in this across countries; suffering varies more with marital status, employment, education, and gender, with women reporting higher suffering than men in most countries (Cowden et al., 2024a).

Meaning and purpose manifest similar demographic relationships as with composite flourishing and are likewise increasing with age (Kim et al., 2024b). For meaning and purpose, the relationships with childhood adversity seem more complex. Death of a parent seems to matter more in Spain, Israel, and Nigeria than Australia, Philippines, Argentina or Japan (wherein estimates were positive, albeit with wide confidence intervals). In some countries (United States) difficult, or even very difficult (Argentina), childhood financial circumstances were associated with higher adult meaning, and in others (Poland) living comfortably was associated with lower adult meaning. In contrast, childhood abuse or feeling like an outsider were essentially universally associated with lower adult meaning (Kim et al., 2024c).

Concerning character (“volitional well-being”), assessments of promoting the good mostly increased with age (though not in all countries; in India and Tanzania this was decreasing with age); were slightly higher with women; and also notably higher with religious service attendance (Chen et al., 2024a; Chen et al., 2024b). Similar patterns were manifest with more objective behaviors such as, within the last month, volunteering, charitable giving, and helping a stranger, though charitable giving and helping was slightly higher among men, volunteering was more uniform in age (until 80+), and helping a stranger decreasing in age (Nakamura et al., 2024a; Nakamura et al., 2024b). The relationships of these behaviors with childhood adversity was also more complex. Childhood abuse and feeling like an outsider predicted higher adult volunteering, giving, and helping; the relationship with childhood health with both volunteering and charitable giving was U-shaped with both excellent childhood health and poor childhood health predicting higher adult volunteering than good health; in some countries very difficult childhood financial circumstances predicted higher adult volunteering (Nakamura et al., 2024c; Nakamura et al., 2024d). In contrast, abuse, feeling like an outsider, poor childhood health, and difficult childhood financial circumstances all tended to decrease capacity for delayed gratification, showing love/care for others, gratitude, and hope (Węziak-Białowolska et al., 2024a; Lee et al., 2024; Okuzono et al., 2024a; Counted et al., 2024a), though none of these variables mattered for forgiveness (Cowden et al., 2024b). Forgiveness, gratitude, and showing love/care were all increasing with age; hope relatively flat with age; and adult delayed gratification decreasing with age. Women reported higher gratitude and love/care than men, and reported similar forgiveness and hope overall, but higher after multivariate control (Okuzono et al., 2024b; Lee et al., 2024; Counted et al., 2024a; Counted et al., 2024b; Cowden et al., 2024b; Cowden et al., 2024c).

With regard to social well-being, patterns for close social relationships mostly followed those of composite flourishing (Wilkinson et al., 2024a; Wilkinson et al., 2024b) except women reported very slightly higher than men, and there was little relationship with education overall. Those with lower education reported higher relationship quality in Indonesia, Kenya, Sweden, and the United States but this pattern was revered in Brazil, Israel, Japan, and Poland. In general, those who were married reported highest relationship quality, but widowed individuals did so in 6 of the 22 countries. Having an intimate friend was roughly constant in age (but highest among 80+); in contrast, having social support was U-shaped with age, higher for women, and higher for students and those retired than those employed; other patterns were relatively similar to that of composite flourishing (Ritchie-Dunham et al., 2024a).

Patterns showed somewhat more variation with communal dimensions of social well-being. For non-religious community, weekly participation decreased with age, was slightly higher for men, higher for those single than married, higher with students than the employed, but itself increasing in religious service attendance (Chen et al., 2024c). Having a sense of belonging within the country followed many of the same patterns as composite flourishing, but was slightly higher for women, slightly decreasing with education, and notably higher for those born within the country (Counted et al., 2024c; Counted et al., 2024d). Similar results pertain to the demographic relations with satisfaction with the city or area one lives, except essentially no male-female difference and a weaker relation with being born within the country. However, the relation with the childhood experiences was rather different: childhood abuse, feeling like an outsider, and finding it difficult financially in childhood were all associated with slightly higher adult place satisfaction, and childhood religious service attendance associated with slightly lower adult place satisfaction. Trust within the country and feeling one had a political voice were both slightly U-shaped with age, and slightly higher for men, with political voice, but not trust, increasing with education (Kim et al., 2024d; Ssozi et al., 2024a). Other patterns were relatively similar to that of composite flourishing.

Concerning financial well-being, the patterns mostly follow those of composite flourishing, especially with respect to the childhood predictors (Bialowolski et al., 2024). However, the subjective indicators were U-shaped with age, whereas being in the highest income quartile follows an inverted-U pattern with age. Men report greater financial security than women, though women report slightly higher material security concerning safety, food, and housing. Religious service attendance is associated with higher subjective financial security, but not the objective indicator of being in the highest income quartile. Otherwise, patterns are mostly similar to those of composite flourishing.

With respect to spiritual well-being, as noted above, how this is understood will vary by tradition and culture. Moreover, many of the religious or spiritual GFS assessments concern behaviors or beliefs that may be determinants of well-being, rather than constituting spiritual well-being per se. We thus restrict comment to a single item involving feeling loved or cared for by God or a spiritual force (Johnson et al., 2024). Even this, of course, may not be applicable in non-theistic religious traditions. We thus focus on the sub-analysis that excludes respondents who indicate that the question is not relevant. The patterns for this indicator follow fairly close those for composite flourishing except proportions are higher for women, and slightly U-shaped with age.

The patterns across countries are complex, and there is no straightforward way to summarize results across all of the indicators and papers. There is considerable variability in the country “ranking” of the ordered means across indicators (Table S29 in the Online Supplement). However, as discussed below, such rankings need to be interpreted cautiously since interpretation of items and response scales vary by language and culture. The interpretation of these thus often only makes sense on a relative basis. In Table 8, we report, for each country, the four well-being indicators, of 47, for which the country, relative to the other indicators, ranked highest, and the four indicators for which the country, relative to the other indicators, ranked lowest, to give some indication of the relative strengths and weaknesses of each country.

With regard to the primary results from the flourishing index, several comments merit attention. One of the more concerning results is the relation with age. On overage, when pooled across the 22 countries, flourishing is increasing with age. This is in striking contrast to earlier work – focused mostly on life satisfaction/evaluation – which had suggested a U-shaped pattern with age (Blanchflower and Oswald, 2008). As noted above, the increasing-with-age pattern in 2023 now also holds on average with many specific aspects of well-being also including balance, inner peace, mastery, optimism, meaning and purpose, promoting good, charitable giving, forgiveness, gratitude, showing love/care, relationship quality, feeling belonging, place satisfaction, and feeling loved by God or a spiritual force. Earlier nationally representative data identified these patterns with all of the various flourishing domains with 2022 data in the United States as well (Chen et al., 2022). This likely reflects real changes that have been taking place over time. Young people are not doing as well as they used to be. While causes are likely diverse, mental health concerns with young adults are clearly on the rise. These patterns are not universal. As noted above, in some countries the patterns concerning flourishing and age are still more U-shaped (India, Egypt, Kenya, Japan) and in others (Poland, Tanzania) decreasing with age. Nevertheless the overall global pattern is troubling. An open question concerns whether these relations constitute a newly patterned “age effect” or whether this is in fact a new “cohort effect.” It is possible that because of social and economic conditions, it simply is more difficult to be younger today, but that well-being for these young people will increase with age. It is, however, also possible, for example, that, within-person, over time, well-being will continue to follow a U-shaped pattern (but with the mean of that U lower) so that the younger cohorts will decline in well-being over time. Only future waves of data collection will be able to distinguish between these two possibilities, or their combination. It should also be noted that the answer to this question is not predetermined, and in fact depends a good deal on the extent to which policy is shaped to try to better support the well-being of young people.

Some of the pooled results presented above are relatively unsurprising in the context of the existing literature. The well-being literature, focused mostly on life satisfaction/evaluation has consistently replicated the results with marriage, employment, and religious service attendance (Diener, 1999; Diener and Biswas-Diener, 2011; VanderWeele, 2017), for example, and these patterns were relatively consistent across countries in the GFS. While the analyses here are purely descriptive, other longitudinal, experimental, and quasi-experimental studies suggest that each of these factors also have a causal role; they are likely “pathways” to flourishing (VanderWeele, 2017). What was interesting in this context, however, is how substantially the magnitudes of differences in flourishing related to these demographic factors varied across countries. Future research could aim at trying to understand the explanations for these differences and whether different cross-cultural mechanisms or moderators (or possibly different patterns of confounding) may be at play. Similar considerations pertain to the differences across countries observed in the relations between flourishing and education, immigration, and gender.

It is of course challenging to condense all of the varying evidence into a limited number of high-level insights. We will, however, here offer three additional, admittedly selected, summary points of interest. First, flourishing is multi-dimensional and different countries are flourishing in different ways. While many developed nations report comparatively higher levels of financial security and life evaluation, these same nations are not flourishing in others ways, often reporting lower meaning (E. S. Kim et al., 2024b), pro-sociality (Chen et al., 2024a), and good relationships (Wilkinson et al., 2024a). Japan reports strikingly low on most well-being indicators, and this here is not purely an artifact of tendency to report in the middle of 0-10 response scales (Oishi, 2010), since the same patterns hold with binary indicators. Other, often middle-income nations, such as Indonesia, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and the Philippines report higher on these other more humanistic aspects of flourishing. The more material and the more humanistic forms of well-being sometime diverge. While purely descriptive, the negative relationship between meaning and GDP-per-capita is particularly striking (E. S. Kim et al., 2024b), and may raise important questions about how to carry out economic development in ways that do not compromise meaning and purpose. Similar considerations may pertain to relationships and character.

Second, there can sometimes be complex relationships between adversity and subsequent flourishing. Often adversity is indeed detrimental, and work must be done to address conditions of adversity and suffering. But sometimes these adverse conditions can for some give rise to development and growth and certain forms of flourishing. The patterns are, however, complex, both across countries, and across outcomes. In some countries, more adverse childhood socioeconomic circumstances were associated with lower levels of adult pain, perhaps suggesting a developed resilience. In the United States and Argentina, difficult childhood financial circumstances were associated with higher adult meaning. These patterns above pertain to some countries, but not others. However, there is also variation across outcomes. Aggregating across all countries, childhood abuse and feeling like an outsider somewhat surprisingly predicted higher levels of adult volunteering, giving, and helping, but lower reported level of showing love/care for others. The effects on these seemingly closely related outcomes are in opposite directions. More work needs to be done to understand under what conditions, or what responses to adversity and suffering, will this lead to growth, rather than further decline. While more can and should be done to address suffering and adverse circumstances, some experience of suffering seems ubiquitous and an almost unavoidable part of the human condition. In addition to trying to reduce suffering, we should also better seek to understand how we might approach and transform such suffering, when we cannot eliminate it, to enable, when possible, further flourishing (VanderWeele et al., 2023), and we should also better understand the limits of such approaches.

Third, in both the demographic analyses and in the childhood predictor analyses, religious service attendance was one of the factors most consistently associated with well-being, across countries, and across outcomes. This is consistent with much prior literature focused principally on the West (Idler, 2014; Balboni et al., 2022; Koenig et al., 2024), but not expanded to a broad range of countries. Service attendance was not beneficially associated with all well-being outcomes. It was associated with slightly higher levels of suffering and of physical pain, which may arise either from differing experiences of it, or sensitivity to it. Service attendance was also associated with a slightly lower sense of place satisfaction. However, with just about every other well-being outcome, in both the demographic analyses and the childhood predictor analyses, there were beneficial dose-response associations with service attendance, often with a fairly steep gradient. While the demographic analyses are purely descriptive, the childhood predictor analyses are intended to provide some evidence for causality. The near ubiquity of these associations is thought-provoking and this factor is arguably too often neglected in our understanding of well-being, and its trends over time. While the present data are insufficient to provide definitive evaluation, it is quite possible that the divergence of material and more humanistic forms of well-being noted above is in large part due to the declining religiosity of more economically advanced nations. We may need a reconsideration of spiritual pathways to well-being.

The strengths of the Global Flourishing Study are many and include nationally representative samples; broad cultural, geographical, and non-Western coverage; large sample sizes; and indicators of numerous well-being and other outcomes along with their determinants. The GFS and the analyses presented in this paper, however, undoubtedly also have limitations. While the GFS has a broad range of constructs and indicators and broad geographical coverage, many of the constructs are assessed with a single indicator. Although resulting issues of power are partially offset by large sample size, this does not mitigate concerns about validity and conceptual breadth for any given construct. The single indicators were selected based on prior work on longitudinal predictive power, and strong correlations with other indicators within a scale (Lomas et al., 2024a), but this does not entirely resolve the concerns. While the study includes 22 countries spanning all six populated continents, conclusions are nevertheless restricted to those 22 countries. The variation of results across countries makes clear that extrapolation to other countries may be unwarranted. Nevertheless, as noted above, some of the patterns appear to be universal across the 22 countries, and for these one might speculate that they may hold more generally.

With regard to limitations of the analyses presented in the paper, the demographic analyses are purely descriptive and should not be interpreted causally. Some caution is also needed in interpreting cross-national differences as these may be influenced by matters of translation, different modes of assessment, differing interpretation of items and also of response scales, and seasonal effects arising from data being collected in different countries at different times of the year. The childhood predictors assessments are retrospective and may be subject to recall bias. Nevertheless, for recall bias to completely explain away the observed associations would require that the effect of adult well-being on biasing retrospective assessments of the childhood predictors would essentially have to be at least as strong as the observed associations themselves (VanderWeele and Li, 2019), and some of these were quite substantial. The childhood predictors analyses may also be subjected to unmeasured confounding, though these concerns were at least partially addressed through the E-value sensitivity analyses, and in some cases the associations found to be quite robust. Future waves of data will give further insight into potential causal relationships concerning well-being and its determinants.

The Global Flourishing Study, and these initial results, help provide foundational knowledge for the promotion of societal flourishing. Understanding the distribution of flourishing across the globe, and by demographic group, helps us to understand who needs help, and in what ways. It allows us to identify the groups towards whom interventions or policies might be targeted to improve well-being. Our analyses likewise give insight into how childhood experiences shape well-being, which may be of interest both descriptively, but also in future intervention and policy development aimed at preventing adverse childhood experiences that impede adult flourishing. One cannot, however, erase the past and the analyses here also suggest that sometimes adversity can give rise to greater resilience and can be pathways for growth. Understanding under what circumstances this can and does take place and how it might be facilitated will be an important direction for future research.

The results also raise important questions for the future progress of society: Are we sufficiently investing in the future given the notable flourishing-age gradient, with the youngest groups often faring the most poorly? Can we carry out economic development in ways that do not compromise meaning and purpose and relationships and character, given that many economically developed nations are not faring as well on these measures? With economic development and secularization, have we sometimes been neglecting, or even suppressing, powerful spiritual pathways to flourishing?

More remains to be done to both understand and respond to these questions and challenges. The Global Flourishing Study is an open-access data resource available through the Center for Open Science. In addition to our analyses, we hope many others will access the data and contribute other important insights, insights that might advance our knowledge of and capacity to promote human flourishing. What we measure shapes what we discuss, what we know, what we aim for, and the policies put in place to achieve those aims. We hope that the Global Flourishing Study itself, and the understandings that arise from it, will shift discussion and policy towards the promotion of flourishing.

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The Global Flourishing Study: Study Profile and Initial Results on Flourishing

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