Media release

From: Springer Nature

Measuring human flourishing *PRESS BRIEFING*

Insights into whether people from different cultures and societies from around the world are flourishing — a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good — are presented in series of papers from the Global Flourishing Study, published in journals across the Nature Portfolio, BMC and Springer imprints. The findings are based on an analysis of over 200,000 people across 22 culturally and geographically diverse countries spanning all six populated continents.

Interest in the concept of whether humans are flourishing has increased in recent years, from researchers in fields such as psychology, economics, education and public policy. However, the concept of flourishing is expansive, and research into the idea has focused mainly on populations and perspectives from the Western hemisphere. To address this, the Global Flourishing Study was established to study the distribution and determinants of well-being, to advance knowledge of flourishing in general, and to uncover what patterns are culturally specific and which seem more universal. The study features questionnaire data from over 200,000 people in 22 countries across the world, which are being collected annually for 5 years, from 2022 to 2027, as well as an analysis of flourishing, which includes factors such as health, happiness, meaning, character, relationships and financial security.

In the flagship paper, published in Nature Mental Health, Tyler VanderWeele, Byron Johnson, and colleagues report relationships 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. The authors find that in countries that include Brazil, Australia, and the US, flourishing increases with age, whereas countries such as Poland and Tanzania see flourishing decrease with age. Some countries, including Japan and Kenya, see a more U-shaped pattern of flourishing with age, in which well-being drops and rises throughout a person’s lifetime. However, when VanderWeele and colleagues pooled these responses across all 22 countries, they observed that measures of flourishing for people 18–49 years of age were essentially flat before increasing later in life. This may indicate that — compared with the results of previous research in this field — many younger people across the world may now be worse off than they were in previous generations.

According to the survey responses analysed by the authors, many countries did not see a substantial difference in flourishing across sexes, although the researchers found that men flourish more than women in Brazil, whereas women flourish more than men in Japan. Similarly, married respondents seemed to have higher flourishing than their single counterparts in many countries based on survey responses. Though, in India and Tanzania, it was the reverse. Those with more education reported higher flourishing in most countries except Hong Kong and Australia, in which the results were the reverse. VanderWeele and colleagues also found that respondents who experienced poverty, abuse or poor health in childhood reported low flourishing in adulthood. An exception to this was Germany, in which the authors found that poor childhood health, compared to good health, seemed to predict higher flourishing in adulthood.

The authors acknowledge that a limitation of the Global Flourishing Study is that no data were collected from low-income nations. VanderWeele and colleagues also note that differences between countries in different aspects of flourishing could be due to translations of the survey and different cultural understanding of the topics surveyed. Other papers in the series reveal insights into differences in optimism across sociodemographic groups and countries, childhood predictors of financial well-being, variation in beliefs in gods and life after death, social trust and more.

“To get policies on the right track to help people flourish, governments should set up systems for collecting robust data on their citizens’ well-being. Rigorous research needs to be undertaken to track populations and guide our understanding of the determinants of flourishing. Neither will be easy,” authors VanderWeele and Johnson write in a Comment piece published in Nature. “All societies need high-quality flourishing data collection, focused on each nation’s and culture’s priorities, throughout the world. Here, we call on countries around the globe to advance this work.”