Measuring Eudaimonia With Meaning and Character
- Tyler VanderWeele
- Apr 29
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 16
Overall flourishing includes meaning, character, and relationships.
By Tyler J. VanderWeele Ph.D.
Key points
We need to pursue economic development and well-being promotion simultaneously.
Measurement of well-being can help inform research, practice, and policy.
We need global expansion of measures of meaning, relationships, and character.
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One of the key insights from the Global Flourishing Study has been that while overall life evaluation and financial security are higher in high-income countries, other aspects of well-being, such as meaning, pro-social character, and relationships, are often higher in middle-income countries. As we’ve discussed previously, this leads to critical questions as to how we can carry out economic development without compromising meaning, character, and relationships. One important, albeit challenging, step in this regard would be to measure such aspects of well-being on a truly global basis.
Eudaimonia
Notions of character have been central to understandings of well-being across time and traditions. In Western contexts, Aristotle—often cited but sometimes misinterpreted in the contemporary well-being literature—conceived of “flourishing” or “eudaimonia” as consisting centrally, but not exclusively, in action in accord with virtue. However, the importance of notions of character and virtues can be seen across philosophical, cultural, and religious traditions. Good character is constitutive of, and helps promote flourishing of oneself and others; though measurement, of course, is not straightforward.
In assessment efforts on well-being, a distinction is sometimes drawn between so-called “eudaimonic” approaches, focused more on fulfilling human potential, and hedonic or evaluative approaches, focused either on how happy or unhappy one feels, or on cognitive evaluations of one’s life or how satisfied one is with it. In the contemporary psychology literature, Carol Ryff argued for the distinction and put forward a eudaimonic understanding of psychological well-being grounded in notions of purpose, personal growth, self-acceptance, positive relations, autonomy, and environmental mastery; and others have followed her.
Both aspects of well-being are arguably important, and both should be assessed, and our own flourishing measure captures both. However, what one assesses will depend on the context and the resources available. In some contexts, only a single-item assessment will be possible; in others, much more extensive measures may be desirable.
Practical Assessment
In thinking about well-being, and in identifying the strengths and areas for growth of individuals and communities, to see who needs help and in what ways, data collection is essential. Our Academic Flourishing Initiative and our Flourishing Schools Project attempt to do this in educational settings and our Flourishing and the Church Initiative in religious contexts.
Measurement can also give rise to research insights that are important for policy and practice. Our Global Flourishing Study has helped to understand both evaluative/hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. For example, feeling like an outsider growing up is unsurprisingly related to overall lower life evaluation in adulthood, but has even more profound effects on happiness and life satisfaction. Or with regard to meaning, we find consistently across countries that childhood religious service attendance can powerfully give rise to a sense of meaning in adulthood. Or with regard to relationships, while in most countries women reported higher relationship quality than men, in Kenya, the pattern is reversed. Or concerning character, while childhood adversity mostly uniformly predicts poorer outcomes, volunteering and charitable giving are among the few outcomes where there appear to be beneficial relationships, suggesting some capacity for personal growth amidst adversity. Such insights are helpful in understanding the distribution of well-being, and what might be done to promote it.
Looking Ahead
While our Global Flourishing Study data has helped expand measurement coverage to many diverse facets of well-being and to many non-Western countries, more remains to be done.
Later this year, we intend to launch an annual nationally representative data collection in the United States on numerous aspects of flourishing, including assessments of national community well-being, and also love (love of neighbor and of enemy) to create a State of the Nation Flourishing Report. We have also been in discussions with the Gallup World Poll, the World Happiness Report group, Baylor’s Institute for Global Human Flourishing, and two philanthropists on expanding the Gallup World Poll quantitative data collection efforts to include not only their ladder life evaluation question, but also questions on life satisfaction, meaning, character, relationships, love, and others. This would constitute a major advance as such data collection would include not just the 22 countries of the Global Flourishing Study, but the 140+ countries of the Gallup World Poll. A recent meeting at the Vatican called for such coordinated spiritually-richer assessment efforts and this would be an important step forward in that regard.
If we are to simultaneously advance economic development and well-being, including meaning, character, and relationships, we need better measurement, and we need to think about these measures in policy. The Everyone Can Flourish collaboration is an effort of UN-Habitat, the UN Local2030 Coalition, the Åland Islands, the Human Flourishing Program, and others, seeking to contribute to the global post UN 2030 Agenda debate and to the global debate over how to broaden our conception of well-being beyond a narrow focus on GDP, as of course are many other groups as well.
We are excited about advancing flourishing in the future. On April 15th of this month, the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard celebrated its tenth anniversary, having been founded in 2016 (with further public celebrations to come later this year). As it so happened, this in fact also coincided, on the very same day, with the United Nations’ First International Wellness Day to promote global wellness for all. The event celebrating the day emphasized especially the UN Sustainable Development Goal 3: Good Health and Well-Being, and helps pave the way for further global efforts in the future. With better measurement, policy, and collaboration, we can advance flourishing and the development of the whole person and the whole of society.
Receive Tyler's monthly insight and research updates from the Human Flourishing Program team.
References
Symons, X., & VanderWeele, T. (2024). Aristotelian flourishing and contemporary philosophical theories of wellbeing. Journal of Happiness Studies, 25(1), 26.
VanderWeele, T.J., Johnson, B.R., et al. (2025). The Global Flourishing Study: Study profile and initial results on flourishing. Nature Mental Health, 3(6), 636-653.
