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About Our Research
Our Studies and Data
The Global Flourishing Study is a longitudinal research study being carried out in collaboration between scholars at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard and Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, and in partnership with Gallup and the Center for Open Science. The study will involve data collection for approximately 240,000 participants, from 22 geographically and culturally diverse countries, with nationally representative samples within each country, and with annual data collection on the same panel of individuals, with a rich set of survey items, for five waves of data. The panel will include individuals from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Egypt, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Turkey, South Africa, Spain, Tanzania, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and will include a rich set of questions on well-being along with demographic, social, economic, political, religious, personality, childhood, community, health and character-based questions. The Global Flourishing Study will be an open-access data resource and the first wave of data collected in 2023. A full report on the survey development process from Gallup is available and the final set of questions that will be used in the Global Flourishing Study can be found in Appendix 2 of that report (p. 43-52). The study will have the potential to transform and dramatically expand our knowledge concerning human flourishing.
The International REACH Forgiveness Trial is a multi-site six-country randomized trial of several thousand individuals to evaluate the effects of a forgiveness workbook intervention on depression, anxiety, and forgiveness itself. The trial will be run in early 2020 with sites in Columbia, South Africa, Ukraine, China, and Indonesia. The International REACH Forgiveness Trial, funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, is a unique collaboration of these sites, the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, program affiliate Everett Worthington (emeritus faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University, who developed the workbook based on his REACH forgiveness model), and Man Yee Ho at the University of Hong Kong.
The Aetna Well-Being Assessment, which ran from 2017-2019, was a project to assess and promote employee well-being at Aetna Inc. A set of 40 well-being questions were developed for the assessment and data was collected on 1,411 employees across two waves in 2018 and 2019. The study data, in addition to the well-being questions, includes social, economic, demographic, workplace, and health-related information, all of which are useful in understanding both the determinants of well-being and also the effect of well-being on work and cost-related outcomes.
We are collaborating with researchers at Duke University on a multi-year study to assess flourishing and also spiritual well-being at a number of Catholic Student Centers around the country. The study data will be useful in assessing how practices, beliefs, and various college experiences and commitments shape career and life decisions, flourishing, and spiritual well-being later in life. The study employs both our flourishing and our Christian spiritual well-being measures. We have collected two waves of data on a pilot sample of students and have launched the full study which will consist of three cohorts of incoming freshmen at Catholic Students Centers at Harvard, Duke, Brown, Iowa State University and Missouri University, with annual data collection during, and after, their college years.
We are collaborating with the SHINE program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health on the development of longitudinal work and well-being surveys, using our flourishing metrics, to assess and promote flourishing in the workplace. The work with SHINE has resulted in a number of well-being data resources, with at least two waves of data, in various workplace settings around the world, including Mexico, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, China, Poland, and the United States.
Many of our analyses and papers have made use of existing data resources concerning health and well-being including the Nurses’ Health Study (NHSI/NHSII), the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study (HPFS), the Growing Up Today Study (GUTS), the Mid-life in the United States Study (MIUDS), and the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). We also have a number of other data collection efforts in collaboration with the Columbus Foundation, Hangzhou University, the University of British Columbia, the Barna Group, and others, which are at earlier stages of development, with only a single wave of data, often directed at preliminary evidence on the properties of our various well-being measures.
Our Methodology
In our empirical work on the determinants of well-being we try to employ, whenever possible, the most rigorous principles of causal inference including employing longitudinal designs, rich confounder adjusting, controlling for baseline outcome and prior levels of exposure. We have published papers on study design considerations and confounding control principles. We also routinely use sensitivity analysis to assess how robust or sensitive our conclusions are to potential unmeasured confounding factors so as to better assess the strength of evidence. Some of our also work employs more sophisticated causal models such as marginal structural models and causal mediation analysis models to examine the effects of time-varying exposures or mechanism. We have employed these approaches, for example, in our work on the effects of religious service attendance on mortality risk and depression and the potential mechanisms governing these relationships.
References:
VanderWeele, T.J. (2021). Can sophisticated study designs with regression analyses of observational data provide causal inferences? JAMA Psychiatry, 78:244-246.
VanderWeele, T.J. (2019). Principles of confounder selection. European Journal of Epidemiology, 34:211-219.
VanderWeele, T.J. and Ding, P. (2017). Sensitivity analysis in observational research: introducing the E-value. Annals of Internal Medicine, 167:268-274.
VanderWeele, T.J., Jackson, J.W., and Li, S. (2016). Causal inference and longitudinal data: a case study of religion and mental health. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 51:1457-1466.
VanderWeele, T.J. (2015). Explanation in Causal Inference: Methods for Mediation and Interaction. New York: Oxford University Press.
Most quantitative empirical studies attempting to assess causality examine only a single exposure and a single outcome. However, this does not allow one to easily see how the exposure or phenomenon under study may affect other outcomes, or what the relative effect magnitudes are, or whether there may be harmful effects on certain outcomes and beneficial effects on others. A more comprehensive study of flourishing requires examining multiple outcomes simultaneously. The outcome-wide longitudinal design developed at the Program extends classical approaches for causal inference to examine multiple outcomes simultaneously. We have published both brief and more comprehensive introductions to this analytic approach and have used this approach to examine the effects on a wide range of outcomes of numerous psychosocial phenomena and exposures including parental warmth, parenting practices, religious service attendance, religious upbringing, forgiveness, social cohesion, volunteering, hope, purpose in life, life satisfaction, character strengths, and financial conditions.
References:
VanderWeele, T.J., Mathur, M.B., and Chen, Y. (2020). Outcome-wide longitudinal designs for causal inference: a new template for empirical studies. Statistical Science, 35:437-466.
VanderWeele, T.J. (2017). Outcome-wide epidemiology. Epidemiology, 28:399-402.
The strongest evidence often comes from meta-analyses that combine evidence over multiple studies. We have developed new metrics for meta-analyses that better characterize evidence when effects may be heterogeneous across settings and potentially have beneficial effects in some contexts and detrimental effects in others. We have also developed methods to help assess whether meta-analyses are robust to potential unmeasured confounding and to publication bias (wherein some studies end up not being published in the research literature and are thereby excluded from such meta-analyses). We have used these approach to help try to resolve controversies in meta-analysis around the effects of violent video games, and media exposure to suicide, smoking, and sexual behaviors, as well as to gain additional insight into supportive employment interventions and job-crafting practices at work.
References:
Mathur, M. and VanderWeele, T.J. (2020). Sensitivity analysis for unmeasured confounding in meta-analyses. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 115:163-172.
Mathur, M. and VanderWeele, T.J. (2019). New metrics for meta-analyses of heterogeneous effects. Statistics in Medicine, 3:1336-1342.
Mathur, M. and VanderWeele, T.J. (2020). Sensitivity analyses for publication bias in meta-analyses. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series C, 69:1091-1119.
The assessment of psychosocial constructs is a perennial challenge in attempts to study well-being. A large psychometric literature has developed along with a host of empirical methodological tools. Unfortunately, most of the empirical approaches are based purely on correlations and ignore potential causal relations between the potential factors under study. Most of the literature on psychometric assessment also tends to ignore the rich insights and important distinctions that have arisen within philosophy and theology concerning the relevant constructs. We have been attempting to develop a more integrated theory of measurement, taking into account causal relationships and incorporating insights and analytic frameworks and definitions from the philosophical and theological literatures. Although this approach is still under development, a number of important critiques of existing practices have already emerged including issues concerning causal relationships between factors under study, differential causal relationships between different indicators of the same construct, and causal interpretation of composite measures using scales or indices. We have also been working towards incorporating insights from the philosophical and theological literature to produce more conceptually satisfactory measures of meaning, suffering, and spiritual well-being, along with current ongoing projects on measurement related to hope, optimism, and love.
References:
VanderWeele, T.J. and Batty, C.J.K. (2023). On the dimensional indeterminacy of one-wave factor analysis under causal effects. Journal of Causal Inference (https://doi.org/10.1515/jci-2022-0074).
VanderWeele, T.J. and Vansteelandt, S. (2022). A statistical test to reject the structural interpretation of a latent factor model. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 84:2032-2054.
VanderWeele, T.J. (2022). Constructed measures and causal inference: towards a new model of measurement for psychosocial constructs. Epidemiology, 33:141-151.
The study of flourishing is inherently interdisciplinary, with various disciplines providing important and distinct insights. Although much of the research at the Human Flourishing Program is empirical, we also contribute humanities scholarship on well-being including work in philosophy, theology, and history. Moreover, we are working towards trying to better integrate or synthesize knowledge across disciplines so as to allow insights from one discipline to contribute the pursuits of another. Such work has included developing empirical hypotheses based on philosophical and theological traditions; allowing claims in the humanities to potentially be challenged by empirical research; incorporating philosophical and theological insights and distinctions into measure development; using philosophy and theology to enrich the interpretation of empirical results; employing empirical social science research methodologies to evaluate interventions based on philosophical or theological insights; and bringing insights together from different disciplines and synthesizing them. We have summarized some of these approaches in a recent paper. While much work remains to be done in developing more systematic approaches to the integration of knowledge across disciplines, we remain committed to an interdisciplinary approach to the study of human flourishing and to continuing to explore how various academic disciplines might better engage with one another.
References:
Case, B.W. and VanderWeele, T.J. (2024). Integrating the humanities and the social sciences: six approaches and case studies. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11:231.
Research Grants
(Consortium of Funders)
The Global Flourishing Study is a longitudinal research study being carried out in collaboration between scholars at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard and Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, and in partnership with Gallup and the Center for Open Science. The study will involve data collection for approximately 240,000 participants, from 22 geographically and culturally diverse countries, with nationally representative samples within each country, and with annual data collection on the same panel of individuals, with a rich set of survey items, for five waves of data. This $43.4 million initiative is being supported by a consortium of funders including the John Templeton Foundation, the Templeton Religion Trust, the Templeton World Charity Foundation, the Fetzer Institute, the Paul Foster Family Foundation, the Wellbeing for Planet Earth Foundation, the Well Being Trust, and the David & Carol Myers Foundation. The study will have the potential to transform and dramatically expand our knowledge concerning human flourishing.
Founding body: John Templeton Foundation
Grant ID 62731
Project Leaders: Tyler VanderWeele & Matthew Lee
Grant Amount $ 1,942,594
Funding Area: Character Virtue Development
Department: Character Virtue Development
The proliferation of conceptualizations and measures of love has limited progress toward assessing the effects of love on a multiplicity of well-being outcomes and on the ability to assess the determinants of love across settings. We propose to employ long-standing philosophical and theological traditions on love, including non-Western traditions, to synthesize current knowledge, advance the interdisciplinary field, and develop a new set of conceptually grounded measures.
Aided by this synthesis, a lexical analysis of love across cultures, and a comprehensive review of existing survey instruments on love, our measures for the assessment of different forms of love across contexts will help initiate a formal epidemiology of love. The specific construct that will be examined related to love is the “disposition toward desiring the good of the other” where the intentionally ambiguous phrase “the good of the other” may itself be understood either as “good for the other” or as the “good constituted by the other.” We will refer to the former as “contributory love” (desiring the good of the other) and the latter as “unitive love” (desiring union with the other) (cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I-II.26.4).
Guided by our interdisciplinary Advisory Board, we will collect data on responses to the proposed items in a variety of settings in order to assess their psychometric properties. Our interpersonal love items will be classified according to (i) unitive and contributory, (ii) giving and receiving, and (iii) parent-child, spouse, friend, God, neighbor, stranger, and enemy. We will assess the effects of love on outcomes and the determinants of love across settings. Our measures will cover a broader array of understandings of love found in the philosophical, theological, and social science literatures than previous measures. As a result, we expect enhanced ability to predict well-being outcomes, which would help move the interdisciplinary field beyond the current impasse.
(John Templeton Foundation)
We have received a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to study the role of religious communities in promoting human flourishing. The research supported by the grant will extend the current knowledge base to a broader range of well-being and flourishing outcomes beyond health, and to countries outside of the United States, by using rigorous methodological approaches arising out of causal inference and large longitudinal data sets.
Together with the SHINE program at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, our well-being research is supported by a research agreement with Aetna Inc. to implement a well-being assessment and promotion program for Aetna employees and to develop data resources for the study of well-being in the workplace.
(Templeton World Charity Foundation)
Together with Man Yee Ho (City University of Hong Kong) and Everett Worthington (Program affiliate and emeritus faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University), we have received a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to study and promote forgiveness around the world and evaluate the effects of a forgiveness workbook intervention in a randomized trial. The funded work is global in scope and includes promotion and research efforts in Columbia, South Africa, Ukraine, China, and Indonesia, ranging from forgiveness measurement, to forgiveness awareness, to intervention evaluation.
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