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 what patterns are more universal versus 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 are continuing to explore these issues. Awareness of such study limitations helps us appropriately weight evidence.
However, other critiques are broader, for example, that “It is well documented in hundreds of papers that well-being and ill-being are correlated with age, income, education, labor force and immigrant status, religion and political beliefs… There is nothing much new under the sun.” And also, especially in reference to our series of country-specific papers, that: “All results have previously been published by the same authors.” These critiques, we believe, are less reasonable, and in a response paper recently published in the International Journal of Wellbeing, we lay out why. We transparently provide the entire vision for, and research infrastructure of, our core Global Flourishing Study research team. We describe our approach to advancing knowledge through coordinated research reports with a common methodology, grounded in principles of multi-purpose epidemiologic cohort designs, outcome-wide templates examining numerous outcomes simultaneously, and multidimensional conceptualizations of flourishing, and how years of planning went into developing this coordinated approach to the design and analysis of the Global Flourishing Study.
Responding: Learning What Is Universal and What Is Context-Specific
Undoubtedly, there has been tremendous learning on the topic of well-being in prior decades, from numerous investigators, across numerous disciplines, and these have indeed demonstrated that “well-being and ill-being are correlated with age, income, education, labor force and immigrant status, religion and political beliefs.” However, much of this literature has been (i) carried out in Western contexts, (ii) has concerned narrow measures of well-being such as happiness, or life satisfaction/evaluation, and (iii) has made use of cross-sectional data, rendering causal inferences more challenging. What the Global Flourishing Study is allowing us to do is to examine how patterns vary across countries, including in non-Western contexts; to examine numerous aspects of well-being, not just happiness/life satisfaction; and, over time, as the waves of data accumulate, to try to use the longitudinal panel data to draw causal inferences.
There is only “nothing much new under the sun” if one were to think that all the patterns for different aspects of well-being are the same, and are the same across all countries. But this simply is not the case. As we note in our response, in most countries, flourishing is increasing with education, but it’s the opposite in Australia and Hong Kong. In many countries, flourishing is now increasing with age, but in Poland and Tanzania, it is decreasing. In many countries, married individuals report higher flourishing than those who are single, but in India and Tanzania it is the reverse. These patterns should not be seen as outliers to some supposedly universal law across countries. They are important results in their own right, relevant to millions of people, or, in the case of India, over a billion people. The International Journal of Wellbeing country-specific commentaries were intended to provide reflection on such country-specific results, rather than only those aggregated across all countries.
Patterns also differ with different aspects of well-being. For example, at the country level, life evaluation is increasing with GDP/capita; however, strikingly, with meaning in life, the pattern is the reverse. Many countries in the study now have patterns with life satisfaction that are increasing-with-age or slightly “J-shaped,” but in many of the same countries, the same patterns do not hold with self-rated physical health (though strikingly in America they do). As another example, unsurprisingly, childhood abuse or neglect predicts worse adult well-being across a host of outcomes, but not all. These same adverse childhood experiences predict higher levels of volunteering, charitable giving, and informal helping, and strikingly, more frequent adult experiences of beauty. All of this is missed if one does not separately examine different aspects of well-being across countries. We ultimately need a better understanding of which patterns seem to be universal, and which are context-specific, and how this varies across countries, and why. That is precisely what our series of research papers is beginning to attempt to do.
Growing in Wisdom
Nevertheless, in light of the totality of all these studies, Blanchflower offers the perhaps reasonable critique, “We are never told which of the 68 variables we should focus on and why.” The questions of “What is most important?”, and “What do we ultimately learn?”, and “What are we to do?” are essential. We ultimately want to grow not only in knowledge, but in wisdom. In our flagship paper, in reflecting on the big-picture takeaways, we pointed towards how different countries are flourishing in different ways, the declining well-being of youth, the role of religion, and the complexities of adversity. Undoubtedly other authors would have drawn attention to other points, and it is in part for this reason that the entire Global Flourishing Study dataset has been made open access, so that others can provide their own insights from it. We have also engaged with groups of policy-makers, academics, and interested individuals from many of the participating countries to better understand their perspectives, to gain insight, and to give the quantitative results greater texture. The International Journal of Wellbeing series of country-specific commentaries was intended to give authors from each of the participating countries a voice as well. Further learning will inevitably come from integrating the results of the Global Flourishing Study with other research through meta-analyses and systematic reviews. While the path to wisdom is not always clear, we hope that these various efforts, and others, and further critiques, will, over time, help us to discern what is most important, and better ways to promote flourishing across countries. This is not the work of one research group, but ultimately of all people.
