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Knowledge of flourishing expands by systematically studying various aspects across countries.

Patterns of flourishing often differ depending on the aspect of well-being examined.

Patterns of flourishing also often differ across countries.

We need a better understanding of what is universal and what is context-specific.

The Global Flourishing Study has allowed us to gain insight into the distribution and determinants of flourishing from over 200,000 participants in 22 countries around the world. We’ve begun to learn which patterns are more universal and which are more context-specific. By using a common set of methodologies across studies, we can have more confidence that different relations for different aspects of well-being (e.g. happiness vs. meaning vs. relationships) are not methodological artifacts, but are giving real insight.

This work has been facilitated not only by the strengths of the study and a common set of methodologies but by partnerships with journals to facilitate coordinated publication of the work. Our Global Flourishing Study special collection with the Springer-Nature journals has hosted a series of papers on demographic relations with different well-being outcomes across countries, and another on childhood predictors of different aspects of well-being. Our partnership with the International Journal of Wellbeing has provided a series of country-specific commentaries on these results. We are grateful for these partnerships and believe they have allowed for the more rapid advancement of knowledge, an advance that likewise was only made possible through the devoted work over many years of a highly collaborative interdisciplinary research team.

Recent Critiques of the Global Flourishing Study

This approach, and our work, have recently come under some critique by an economist, David Blanchflower. Some of the critiques are quite reasonable, for example, concerning methodological issues, such as so-called “mode effects” wherein individuals may be inclined to answer differently depending on whether they are contacted via telephone versus online. We have noted this as a limitation in our work, and........

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