Our Flourishing Measures

Our primary flourishing measure focuses on the flourishing of an individual. However, we are also often interested in whether our communities are flourishing, be they those of the family, or city, or workplace, or nation. We have developed a measure of community well-being to help assess the extent to which a community may be flourishing. The proposed measure includes items in six domains relevant to community well-being: flourishing individuals, good relationships, proficient leadership, healthy practices, satisfying community, and strong mission. The community well-being measure extends beyond simple measures of community satisfaction which are often currently employed. The measure is intended to supplement other objective assessments of community well-being (e.g. literacy, education, GDP, etc.). Adaptation of the measure for a variety of contexts is provided so that the proposed approach can be used in nations, cities, neighborhoods, families, workplaces, schools, and religious communities. The conceptual background for the measure and the individual items that make up the measure can be found in the paper below:

VanderWeele, T.J. (2019). Measures of community well-being: a template. International Journal of Community Well-Being, 2:253-275.

We have currently collected data on the measure in a random sample of residents in Columbus, Ohio, and in schools, universities and churches.

An initial assessment of the psychometric properties of the measure of community well-being can be found in:

Padgett, R.N., Lee, M.T., Wilkinson, R., Tsavaris, H. and VanderWeele, T.J. (2024). Reliability and validity of a multidimensional measure of subjective community well-being. Assessment, 31:1658-1673.

For much of the world’s population religion or spirituality is of central importance. For many, it is the most important aspect of life. While various measures of spiritual well-being have been used in prior research, these are typically too generic specific to capture the principal ends and concerns of most actual religious communities. Moreover, many of the generic spiritual well-being measures are often not sufficiently general to apply to non-theistic or non-monotheistic religions. Arguably, to adequately assess spiritual well-being, tradition-specific measures are needed. In collaboration with Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox pastors, priests, theologians, spiritual directors, and laity, we have developed a set of items to assess spiritual well-being within the Christian tradition. The items cover the domains of beliefs, practices, service, communion with God, character, and relationships. A future conference hosted by the program will describe the development process and invite scholars and theologians of other faith traditions to develop analogous measures. If the measurement of spiritual well-being is to more routinely take place in a pluralistic society, a range of measures, across religious traditions, will arguably be needed. The conceptual background for the measure and the individual items that make up the measure can be found in the paper below:

VanderWeele, T.J., Long, K. and Balboni, M.J. (2021). On tradition-specific measures of spiritual well-being. In: M. Lee, L.D. Kubzansky, and T.J. VanderWeele (Eds.). Measuring Well-Being: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from the Social Sciences and the Humanities. Oxford University Press, Chapter 16: 482-498.

While we all almost universally seek happiness and desire to flourish, life almost always also includes loss and suffering. Any adequate understanding of human flourishing must include an understanding of how to integrate and respond to suffering. Suffering is not the opposite of flourishing – indeed there are numerous philosophical and theological traditions that suggest that suffering can lead to growth and transformation. However, suffering does entail some loss, some absence of a good, and an understanding of flourishing should be able to account for suffering as well. A number of symptom-based measures of suffering, often applicable to specific clinical contexts, have been proposed previously. There are also a number of existing single-item measures to assess suffering. However, multi-item assessment of suffering that extends beyond the clinical context has been lacking. As a result of an interdisciplinary conference on suffering hosted by the Program in 2017, and bringing together philosophers, theologians, psychologists, and clinicians, we extracted a number of common themes from the discussion to propose a multi-item measure of suffering, the Personal Suffering Assessment. The conceptual background for the measure and the individual items that make up the measure can be found in the paper below:

VanderWeele, T.J. (2019). Suffering and response: directions in empirical research. Social Science and Medicine, 224:58-66.

We have collected data on the measures in a sample of over 1,200 factory workers in Sri Lanka and in another sample of over 5,000 international flights attendants. The reliability of the measure was alpha=0.87 for the sample in Sri Lanka, and alpha=0.95 for the sample of flight attendants.

One of the Human Flourishing Program’s major research themes is the study of what gives rise to a sense of meaning and purpose in life. We have used a number of existing datasets and existing measures to aid us in this study. However, we are also trying to create new data resources to study the determinants of meaning and purpose more adequately, and in these datasets, we are introducing what is arguably a more thorough and conceptually grounded assessment of meaning. The Comprehensive Measure of Meaning (CMM) is intended to incorporate the results of philosophical discussion into an established framework coming to predominate the psychological literature that meaning is experienced along three dimensions: cognitive coherence, affective significance, and motivational purposive direction. The CMM principally makes use of a wide variety of items, or their adaptation, already in use from previous scales, but categorizes these in ways consistent with important distinctions derived from the philosophical literature. A summary of the CMM is available and the conceptual background for the measure and the individual items that make up the measure can be found in the paper below:

Hanson, J.A. and VanderWeele, T.J. (2021). The Comprehensive Measure of Meaning: psychological and philosophical foundations. In: M. Lee, L.D. Kubzansky, and T.J. VanderWeele (Eds.). Measuring Well-Being: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from the Social Sciences and the Humanities. Oxford University Press, Chapter 12: 339-376.

We have collected data concerning the measure on a sample of over 4,000 undergraduates at the University of British Columbia.

Psychometric properties of the measure can be found in:

Padgett, R., Hanson, J.A., Nakamura, J.S., Ritchie-Dunham, J.L., Kim, E.S., and VanderWeele, T.J. (2024).  Measuring meaning in life by combining philosophical and psychological distinctions: psychometric properties of the Comprehensive Measure of Meaning. Journal of Positive Psychology, in press.

As part of a project funded by the John Templeton Foundation, "The Construct and Assessment of Interpersonal Love" (Grant 62731), we have developed a series of interrelated measures for different forms of interpersonal love including parent-child love, friendship love, love of neighbor, love of enemy, love of stranger, and spousal/romantic love. Our love of neighbor measure provides a template for other forms of love, and is arguably the most universal of the different forms of inter-personal love. We have collected data on, and reported the psychometric properties of, the neighbor love measure in a recent paper, which also provides the current items for the assessment of the other forms of interpersonal love as well. We will be collecting data on and evaluating the psychometric properties of the other forms of interpersonal love in the months ahead. 

24-Item Version

We have partnered with the 100 Million Healthier Lives initiative to combine their items with those in our own flourishing measure to form a 24-item assessment with 3 items in each of the following eight domains:  1) Life Satisfaction and Life Evaluation; 2) Physical Health, Mental Health, and Physical Function 3)  Meaning and Purpose; 4) Character and Caring; 5) Relationships; 6) Community and Social Support; 7) Financial Evaluation and Stability 8) Affect. This consolidated set of items are available here.

40-Item Version

We have partnered with Aetna Inc. on the development of a well-being assessment across the following six domains: emotional health, physical health, purpose, character strengths, social connectedness, and financial security. This 40-item assessment is available here and documented in the paper:

Lee, M.T., Weziak-Bialowolska, D., Mooney, K.D., Lerner, P.J., McNeely, E., VanderWeele, T.J. (2020). Self-assessed importance of domains of flourishing: demographics and correlations with well-being. Journal of Positive Psychology, in press.

We have a version of flourishing measure for adolescents (ages 12-18) that makes modifications to some of the items (2, 6, 10, and 11) from our adult flourishing measure to better account for developmental stage. That measure is available here. Based on a sample of 556 students from the Shipley School (Bryn Mawr, PA), Cronbach's alpha for the adolescent measure is 0.89 for the 12 item measure (with the financial and material stability items), or 0.91 if the the financial and material stability items are excluded. The following refence can be used for citation of the measure:

Lee, M.T., Kubzansky, L.D., and VanderWeele, T.J. (2020). Measuring Well-Being: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from the Social Sciences and the Humanities. Chapter 14. Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

We have been doing some experimental work with using the Gallup World Poll items to form a flourishing score, corresponding crudely to the domains of our own flourishing measure. A description of the consturction of this flourishing score using the Gallup items is available here. The use of this score is still at an experimental stage and has not been validated.

A number of measures have been proposed that incorporate both number of years of life and also various aspects of well-being, often for the purposes of medical decision-making. These include “quality-adjusted life years” (QALYs), which are calculated using the years of life remaining but weighting each year with a quality-of-life score (on a 0 to 1 scale), often determined by an individual’s ability to carry out daily activities and their freedom from pain and mental disturbance. A related metric, "well-being years" (WELLBYs), instead uses a single-item life satisfaction response for its weighting of each year of life. Alternatively, if one wanted to broaden the scope of well-being to include not only life satisfaction but also meaning and purpose, health, character, and social relationships, one could carry out the weighting by our 10-item flourishing flourishing measure to provide a broader picture of flourishing. The resulting metric, obtained by weighting each year of life by the flourishing measure, might be referred to as “flourishing years” (FLRYs). We think that this measure is useful when evaluating the extent to which flourishing can be enhanced, and over what lengths of time. However, as we have noted elsewhere, we believe that QALYs and WELLBYs and FLRYs are all problematic when used in life-and-death decision-making because they tend to discriminate against the poor, disabled and vulernable, by down-weighting their lives, since their self-reported well-being tends to be lower. Thus we would advocate for only using these measures when making decisions on enhancing well-being, and would caution against their use in life-and-death decision-making.