Flourishing — a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good — should be the goal of people and nations everywhere1,2. As well as encompassing personal experiences of happiness, health, meaning, pro-sociality, relationships and financial security, flourishing extends to strong communities and good environments.
Yet, for something so central to all our lives, research efforts on flourishing have, so far, been woefully inadequate. It’s not entirely for lack of trying. It’s hard to build infrastructure to collect data nationally, let alone globally, on so many aspects of people’s lives. And there are many challenges in how to analyse such data meaningfully so that they can be used to inform policies.
Global Flourishing Study – Wave I
There’s no single question that can be asked to evaluate well-being3. For example, economic indicators such as gross domestic product (GDP) don’t tell us how people in a given country are faring — loneliness, societal division and meaninglessness can be rife even in the richest countries2,4. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)5 can support general drivers of well-being, such as public health and access to water and energy. But they don’t include subjective personal assessments of how purposeful or hopeful people are.
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.
As a first step, here we highlight early results from a large multinational survey — the Global Flourishing Study2 (GFS) — that has collected data from more than 200,000 individuals in 22 countries, representing about half of the world’s population. We call on governments around the globe to step up and do more.
Five challenges
Collection of global data on flourishing is hindered by five factors.
Multiple dimensions. First, if flourishing consists of all aspects of life, the list of what potentially to measure is endless. Moreover, happiness, meaning, relationship quality, income and health are not all perfectly correlated. For example, people in high-income countries tend to evaluate their quality of life as higher but their meaning of life lower than do those in lower-income nations2,4,6. Extensive assessments are needed to understand these nuances, yet no single survey can cover everything.
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To take a general look, the World Happiness Report’s7 global ranking is based on one question from a data-collection survey called the Gallup World Poll, which uses the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale (Cantril Ladder). The question asks: “Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you, and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?” But a study published last year has indicated that this question often prompts people to think more about status and money than other aspects of well-being, such as relationships8.
Furthermore, a single question cannot unveil the subtleties and different dynamics across various aspects of well-being. For example, in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, people’s perceptions of happiness, health and financial security decreased more than did those of meaning and social connectedness9. Yet few surveys look beyond questions of life evaluation and satisfaction.
Objective and subjective elements. Assessments of flourishing must cover both the objective state of affairs around a person’s life (their income, environment, job and so on) and the person’s subjective sense of well-being (how happy, secure and connected they feel, for example).
The former is more routinely measured, with national data often available on income, literacy, employment, life expectancy and a host of other objective measures. The latter is less frequently explored, but crucially important. Two people can spend the same amount of time with others in a work setting or school, and one might feel connected and the other lonely. More research is needed around these subjective aspects to more fully understand human experience.
Another difficult question is how to prioritize objective versus subjective elements when designing policy. There is plenty of evidence that objective elements affect subjective elements, and vice versa10. For example, happy individuals are more successful in relationships, income and work performance. But there is no definitive way to judge these trade-offs between the objective and the subjective. Researchers still need to examine whether targeting policies towards objective well-being ultimately has a larger effect on subjective well-being, or the reverse.
Older people reported greater well-being than younger ones in Mexico, a nation with strong community traditions.Credit: Gerardo Vieyra/NurPhoto via Getty
Translation and interpretation. In any global survey, people who live in different countries and who speak different languages will have varying understandings of the questions. Words are translated and interpreted differently in different contexts.
Even perceptions on numbered response scales can vary by country. For example, people in some East Asian countries might prefer to report towards the middle of the scale6, because extremes can seem boastful or undesirable.
Researchers need to know: are we really measuring the same thing? Are results comparable across countries? If they are not, well-being rankings7 must be interpreted cautiously. A better understanding of differences in interpretation through cognitive interviews11 can provide greater context, help to situate results and further increase awareness of limitations.
Differing priorities. Different societies might value autonomy, relationships and financial prosperity to varying degrees. Any set of questions necessarily entails settling on a set of values that might not be equally applicable to all. Autonomy might be given more emphasis in Western societies. Balance, peace and harmony, although arguably universally valued, might be given more emphasis in Eastern cultures12. We should respect the priorities and values of each nation and culture. This, however, does make standardized data collection more challenging and requires a broader set of measures.
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Methodological challenges. As well as the obstacles we’ve already mentioned, researchers struggle to obtain longitudinal data over time in order to discern causation, to achieve adequate sample sizes and to obtain data that can act as controls in discerning true drivers of flourishing. Association is not causation, and longitudinal data from the same group of linked individuals over time is needed to try to separate cause from effect. Controlling for confounding factors requires yet more data. Therefore, large sample sizes are essential to help to tease out associations.
Researchers must also pay attention to issues around measurement. With self-reported survey answers, social-desirability biases (respondents wanting to give more attractive answers) and self-deception biases (with respondents thinking of themselves more highly than they ought to) come into play and can vary by country. Collecting data on more-objective assessments of well-being can partially counter these problems.
A world-wide perspective
The GFS2 is an ambitious project that is trying to address some of these challenges, through including large sample sizes, a wide range of questions, nationally representative samples to understand dynamics at the country level and longitudinal data collection. It is collecting data annually for five years, from 2022 to 2027. The survey was shaped by input from scholars around the world and includes 109 questions, including ones on community, economics, politics, childhood experiences and spirituality or religion2,13. The data are freely available through the Center for Open Science (see www.cos.io/gfs). The first wave (mostly 2023 data) was released in February 2024, and the second wave (2024 data) was released in April this year.
