Systemic drivers and personal outcomes of flourishing: Integrating Harvard and SAGE frameworks through analysis of the Global Flourishing Study and the Gallup World Poll

Flourishing is an increasingly prominent concept in scholarship on well-being, as for example reflected in the work of VanderWeele, who defines it expansively as “the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good, including the contexts in which that person lives.” Along these lines, this paper explores the integration of two complementary frameworks, one mainly focusing on people themselves, one more on their wider contexts. The former is the prerogative of VanderWeele’s own proposed individual measure, with six domains: happiness and life satisfaction; health, both mental and physical; meaning and purpose; character and virtue; close social relationships; and financial and material stability. Attending more to broader contexts is the SAGE approach of economist Dennis Snower, with four dimensions: solidarity; agency; material gain; and environment. We empirically explore their integration by analysing items pertaining to all 10 dimensions across two international datasets, the Global Flourishing Study (GFS) and the Gallup World Poll (GWP), together with objective data pertaining to material gain and the environment. The results show a complex picture depending on the data analysed. In the GFS, for instance, solidarity was generally positively correlated with average flourishing at the country level, but had an unexpectedly negative association with flourishing at the individual level. In the GWP, using different and more ad-hoc flourishing assessments, these associations were mostly positive, but conversely financial/material stability had negative associations with the SAGE domains. Equally surprising was that the objective measures of gain and the environment were negatively associated with personal flourishing (combined across the GFS and GWP). We take a first step toward accounting for these negative associations through various socio-economic hypotheses.