The Global Flourishing Study is a $43.4 million, five years study, involving more than 200,000 individuals from 22 countries, which aims to start a global dialogue on what it means to flourish as a human being. Roger Higman explores its initial findings.
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The Global Flourishing Study was launched on 30th April. It is a five year collaboration between Harvard University, Baylor University, Gallup and the Centre for Open Science, with support from the John Templeton Foundation amongst many others. It aims to understand the distribution and determinants of wellbeing – and ultimately the social conditions that enable people to flourish.
It will involve longitudinal surveys, over the next five years, of representative samples from 22 different countries, including the United Kingdom. These explore six key dimensions that research suggests are important to flourishing:
- happiness and life satisfaction;
- physical and mental health;
- meaning and purpose;
- character and virtue;
- close social relationships
- financial security.
The study compiled results from two questions on the first five dimensions to create a flourishing index for each country. This led to very different rankings to those of the World Happiness Report which looks annually at life satisfaction and how it varies between the countries in the world. Whereas, life satisfaction peaks in countries like Denmark and Finland, the introduction of a broader set of indicators, including meaning and purpose, changes the ranking markedly. Countries such as Indonesia, Mexico and the Phillipines scored highly while the UK languished third from bottom of the 22 countries surveyed.
Some key findings were outlined by study co-Principal, Prof. Tyler Vanderweele of Harvard University, at the launch. Notably,
- older people seem to flourish more than the young while marriage, employment, higher education and religious devotion all seem to relate to higher flourishing, though, in each case, not in all countries;
- young people aren’t flourishing. This is in contrast to data on life satisfaction that suggest that younger people are happier with their lives than those in middle age;
- people in different countries flourish in different ways. People in high income countries tend to report higher levels of life satisfaction but score lower on meaning, purpose, character and prosocial relationships.
- participation in religious activity seems to relate closely to flourishing, though this may be an artifact of the way they’ve designed the Index.
You can learn more about the Global Flourishing Study through this short film (below) and from this Gallup report. Researchers can explore the data here.