LBL Flourishing Index Methodology
The instrument synthesizes evidence from the Global Flourishing Study (Wave 1, Nature Mental Health, April 2025), Ryff's Psychological Well-Being model (Ryff, 1989), Snyder's Hope Theory (Snyder et al., 1991), Ersner-Hershfield's future-self continuity work (Ersner-Hershfield et al., 2009), and Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000). It does not implement any single existing scale verbatim; items are original to LBL, scoring is transparent, and the framework is released under CC BY-NC 4.0 for free educational and non-commercial use with attribution.
This page is the complete methodological disclosure. It does not replace the tool's in-page methodology summary, which is condensed for use during a session; it expands on every component, names the literature each construct is drawn from, and is honest about which scoring parameters are empirical and which are LBL judgment.
Current output boundary
LBL-FI v2.2 restores the original detailed assessment experience and the original d7 weighting. The 16 area values and 80/20 summary are arithmetic descriptions of this response set. Archetype names, growth-edge language, the trajectory illustration, and Flourishing Age are LBL-authored exploratory displays; they are unvalidated, non-normative, non-clinical, non-predictive, and not person-level forecasts.
Read higher current ratings and lower current ratings only as relative positions within this response set—a descriptive within-response comparison. Future outlook is separate and user-stated. The display is descriptive and non-causal. Retakes are not a validated change measure and have no validated change threshold.
Ordinary scoring remains in page memory. Optional copying and account saving are separate, user-initiated actions; account saving sends derived values only. The paid-report handoff remains disabled.
Sections
- What this tool measures
- Why it matters: the case for a composite
- The 16-dimension framework
- Tier 1: the 9 core dimensions
- Tier 2: the 7 contextual dimensions
- The 4-stage scoring algorithm
- Archetype matching and the 6 archetypes
- Your stated outlook (no prediction)
- Historical Flourishing Age display (inactive)
- What is empirical vs. LBL judgment
- Direct-response support boundary
- Privacy, transmission & persistence
- Limitations & open questions
- Frequently asked questions
- Related and applied guides
- References
What this tool measures
The output is not a diagnosis. It is a structured snapshot of how a person's life is currently resourced across the major spheres of well-being identified in contemporary research. The composite is shown alongside the per-dimension breakdown precisely so the user can see which dimensions are pulling the headline number up and which are pulling it down — a profile, not a verdict.
“Flourishing” in this framework is broader than “happiness” and broader than “life satisfaction.” A person can be happy in a hedonic moment-to-moment sense but feel their life lacks purpose; can have meaningful work but be socially isolated; can have wealth and health but feel disconnected from their values; can have all of these but feel that the trajectory of their life is bending in a direction that does not match who they want to become. A flourishing measure that collapses these distinctions into a single number is doing less work than the construct deserves.
The LBL Flourishing Index treats well-being as multidimensional and tier-structured: nine load-bearing core dimensions (Tier 1) drive the composite and the archetype, and seven contextual dimensions (Tier 2) provide context for interpreting the Tier 1 pattern. The user sees both tiers, but the math is honest about which is doing the heavy lifting.
Why it matters: the case for a composite
The classical argument for a composite goes back to Aristotle's eudaimonia — the claim that a flourishing life is not one thing but a constellation of goods that hang together. Twentieth-century empirical psychology took two roughly orthogonal turns. The hedonic tradition, anchored in Diener's subjective well-being research, treats well-being as the positive balance of affect and a global judgment of life satisfaction. The eudaimonic tradition, anchored in Ryff's Psychological Well-Being model (Ryff, 1989), treats well-being as the realization of human potential across six facets: self-acceptance, positive relations with others, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life, and personal growth.
The Harvard Flourishing Index (VanderWeele, 2017) brought these traditions into a more integrative six-domain framework: happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, and financial and material stability. The Global Flourishing Study (Wave 1 published in Nature Mental Health, April 2025) operationalized that framework in a longitudinal panel of over 200,000 participants across 22 countries, providing a major cross-cultural research dataset for the GFS instrument. It does not provide norms or a validated crosswalk for LBL-FI.
The LBL Flourishing Index builds on this composite tradition but extends it. Where the most widely cited short-form measure covers six domains in twelve items, the LBL instrument adds nine further facets that the six-domain framework either does not explicitly include or treats only implicitly:
- Inner Life & Self-Awareness — the meta-cognitive capacity to attend to one's own experience without immediately acting on it (drawn from the contemplative-practice and mindfulness literature)
- Personal Growth — the perceived trajectory of becoming, distinct from current achievement (Ryff's growth facet, extended)
- Autonomy — the felt sense of acting from one's own values rather than from external pressure (Deci & Ryan, 2000)
- Time Freedom — the felt presence or absence of time poverty, increasingly recognized as a load-bearing variable in modern well-being (Whillans, Dunn, et al.)
- Environmental Fit — the perceived fit between the person and their physical, social, and cultural environment
- Prospective Self-Continuity & Hope — the perceived continuity between the present self and the imagined future self, combined with agency-and-pathway thinking (Ersner-Hershfield et al., 2009; Snyder et al., 1991)
- Integrity — the felt alignment between stated values and lived action
- Service — the experience of one's life as oriented outward toward others' welfare
- Community — the felt presence of a wider belonging beyond intimate relationships
The result is a 16-dimension framework organized into two tiers. Tier 1 (9 core dimensions) drives the composite, archetype assignment, and Growth Edge identification. Tier 2 (7 contextual dimensions) appears on the user's results page but contributes only 20% of the displayed composite — these are facets worth noticing for awareness, not facets worth optimizing for a number.
Treating all 16 dimensions as equal would imply that, e.g., Environmental Fit is as load-bearing as Mental Health for the overall picture of someone's flourishing. The literature does not support that. Tier 1 dimensions are the well-established load-bearing components of subjective well-being and meaningful life; Tier 2 dimensions are contextual modifiers that condition how Tier 1 plays out for a given person. The 80/20 weighting honors this distinction without pretending the dimensions are not all real.
The 16-dimension framework
Each dimension is measured with one or two items. Tier 1 dimensions use two items each (18 items total) to give a more stable per-dimension score; Tier 2 dimensions use a single item each (7 items total) because they are contextual modifiers rather than load-bearing components. All items use a 0–10 sliding scale; no item is reverse-coded — higher always means more of the dimension. Items are LBL-original.
The wording of each dimension's items is calibrated to capture the construct rather than the construct's name. For example, the Hope dimension does not ask “how hopeful are you?” (which conflates trait optimism with future-thinking) — it asks two items that operationalize Snyder's hope-theory components (agency and pathways) and Ersner-Hershfield's future-self continuity. This is how we get a 0–10 number that is actually about hope as a construct, not about how a respondent feels at the moment of answering.
Architecture summary
- Tier 1 (core) — 9 dimensions, 18 items, drives composite at 80% weight
- The well-established load-bearing components of well-being. These are the dimensions where the empirical literature most strongly supports treatment as separable, measurable, intervention-responsive facets of human flourishing. Tier 1 also drives archetype assignment and the trajectory model.
- Tier 2 (contextual) — 7 dimensions, 7 items, contributes 20% of composite weight
- Facets that condition how Tier 1 plays out for a given person. A person with strong Tier 1 dimensions but poor Environmental Fit, low Autonomy, or chronic Time Poverty has a different lived situation than someone with the same Tier 1 numbers and resourced Tier 2 dimensions. Tier 2 contributes to the composite at 20% so this conditioning is reflected in the headline, but the lower weight reflects that Tier 2 modifies Tier 1 rather than displacing it.
Tier 1: the 9 core dimensions
Joy & Life Satisfaction
The hedonic and evaluative component of well-being: the moment-to-moment experience of positive affect, and the global judgment of one's life as a good one. These two facets are conceptually distinct (one is affective, one is cognitive) but they covary tightly enough to be averaged into a single dimension.
What good looks like: A person whose moods are characteristically more positive than negative, who, on reflection, judges their life to be going well, and who can recognize and savor moments of pleasure without immediately moving past them.
Mental Health
Equanimity and the absence of disabling distress. Not the absence of all difficult emotion, but the felt capacity to feel difficult emotions without being overrun by them. This dimension is a non-clinical screen of functional mental health, not a diagnostic instrument; users in genuine psychological difficulty are routed to crisis support resources via the Adrift archetype.
What good looks like: A person who experiences a normal range of human emotion, who has reasonably reliable strategies for moving through difficult states, and whose mental life does not regularly impair their work, relationships, or capacity to engage with the day.
Inner Life & Self-Awareness
The meta-cognitive capacity to attend to one's own experience without immediately acting on it. This is the dimension that contemplative traditions, the mindfulness literature, and the psychotherapy tradition all converge on: the ability to notice an emotion, thought, or impulse and hold it long enough to see what it is, before reacting.
What good looks like: A person who can name what they are feeling with reasonable accuracy; who can identify the gap between an initial impulse and a more considered response; who has a developed sense of their own internal world and is on speaking terms with most of it.
Personal Growth
The perceived trajectory of becoming — the felt sense that one is moving toward a more developed self, not just running in place. Distinct from current achievement; this is about the direction, not the absolute position.
What good looks like: A person who can name something they have learned or become in the past year that was not true of them before; who has at least a loose sense of what they are working toward; who can revise their self-image when evidence demands it.
Physical Health & Vitality
The body's resources for showing up to the rest of life. Sleep, energy, the felt sense of physical capacity. Not athletic performance or aesthetic body composition — this is the more basic question of whether the body is a place the person can comfortably live.
What good looks like: A person who sleeps adequately most nights, who has enough energy to do what they want to do, who can move through their day without persistent physical pain or chronic fatigue setting the upper limit on what they can accomplish.
Meaning & Purpose
The eudaimonic component: the felt sense that one's life matters and that one's daily actions cohere with something one cares about. Distinct from happiness (which is hedonic). A person can be unhappy in difficult circumstances and still have a strong sense of meaning; conversely, a person can be pleasure-rich and meaning-poor.
What good looks like: A person who could say, with some specificity, what their life is for — not in a grand cosmic sense, but in the practical sense of what they would not be willing to trade away. A felt connection between today's actions and something larger.
Prospective Self-Continuity & Hope
Two converging constructs: prospective self-continuity (Ersner-Hershfield et al., 2009) — the perceived continuity between the present self and the imagined future self, which predicts whether people make decisions that serve their future selves — and hope in Snyder's sense, which is a cognitive set composed of agency thinking (“I can”) and pathways thinking (“there are ways”).
What good looks like: A person who can imagine their future self as a real continuation of who they are now; who can name some directions they hope to move in over the next five years; who, when asked whether they expect to look back on their life as worth having lived, can answer with something other than “I don't know.”
Why this dimension is special: d7 retains the original weighted rule: q13 contributes 40% and q14 contributes 60%. Care-aware emphasis is triggered only by a direct q14 response of 2 or below; the grouped d7 score does not trigger it.
Close Relationships
The presence of dependable, reciprocal close relationships — people one can turn to without performing, who turn to one in return. The Harvard Study of Adult Development (Waldinger & Schulz, 2023), now in its ninth decade, has identified close relationship quality as the single strongest predictor of long-term well-being, exceeding income, education, fame, and intelligence.
What good looks like: A person who could name at least one or two people they could call if their life fell apart, and who could also name people who would call them. Not a function of how many friends one has; it is a function of how reliably one is met by someone one is also reliably meeting.
Material Security
The basic floor of financial and material adequacy: not wealth, but the felt absence of acute financial fear. The literature on the relationship between income and well-being suggests a threshold effect — below a certain level of material security, additional income produces meaningful well-being gains; above it, the gains flatten substantially. This dimension is calibrated to capture presence of the floor, not height above it.
What good looks like: A person who is not regularly anxious about meeting basic needs, who has at least some small buffer against unexpected expenses, who can think about money decisions deliberately rather than reactively.
Tier 2: the 7 contextual dimensions
Tier 2 dimensions are facets that condition how Tier 1 plays out for a given person. A user can have strong Tier 1 dimensions and still be living a poorly-resourced life if their autonomy is constrained, their time is owned by others, or their physical and social environment fits them poorly. Tier 2 captures these conditioning facets without giving them equal weight to the load-bearing core.
Integrity
The felt alignment between stated values and lived action. A person can have high Tier 1 numbers and still feel that their daily life and their values are out of sync; that gap is what this dimension measures.
Service
The experience of one's life as oriented outward toward others' welfare — meaningfully distinct from how good a person feels about themselves. Service-oriented living predicts well-being above and beyond meaning and relationships taken separately.
Community
Belonging beyond intimate relationships — the felt presence of a wider social fabric one is part of. Distinct from d8 Close Relationships; this is the “town” rather than the “tribe.”
Autonomy
The felt sense of acting from one's own values rather than from external pressure. Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000) identifies autonomy as one of three basic psychological needs whose satisfaction predicts well-being across cultures.
Work
The felt experience of one's work life as supportive of flourishing rather than corrosive of it. Captures both job crafting capacity (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001) and the broader question of whether work fits the person or only consumes them.
Time Freedom
The felt presence or absence of time poverty. Time poverty is increasingly recognized as a load-bearing variable in modern well-being — the experience of perpetual scarcity of unstructured time predicts well-being decrements at every income level.
Environmental Fit
The perceived fit between the person and their physical, social, and cultural environment. A person can have strong Tier 1 and still be in the wrong place for who they are; Environmental Fit captures that.
The 4-stage scoring algorithm
LBL-FI v2.2 scoring uses transparent arithmetic and explicitly stated weights — no reverse-coded items and no transformations that obscure the relationship between inputs and outputs. The user can in principle verify every number on the results page using the formulas below.
Stage 1: Dimension scores
For each Tier 1 dimension except d7, the two items are averaged:
di = (item_A + item_B) / 2
d7 = (0.4 × q13) + (0.6 × q14)
For each Tier 2 dimension tj, the single item value is the dimension score:
tj = item_value
All dimension scores therefore fall in the [0, 10] interval.
Stage 2: Tier averages
The Tier 1 average is the unweighted mean of the 9 core dimension scores:
tier1_avg = (d1 + d2 + d3 + d4 + d5 + d6 + d7 + d8 + d9) / 9
The Tier 2 average is the unweighted mean of the 7 contextual dimension scores:
tier2_avg = (t1 + t2 + t3 + t4 + t5 + t6 + t7) / 7
Stage 3: Displayed composite (80/20 weighted)
The headline composite score shown on the results page weights Tier 1 at 0.8 and Tier 2 at 0.2:
composite = (tier1_avg × 0.8) + (tier2_avg × 0.2)
The 80/20 weighting reflects the architectural distinction described in the Tier 1 / Tier 2 section above. Tier 1 dimensions are load-bearing components; Tier 2 are contextual modifiers. The composite falls in [0, 10].
Stage 4: Variance for archetype assignment
Archetype assignment uses the unweighted Tier 1 average (not the 80/20 composite) together with the standard deviation across the 9 Tier 1 dimensions:
sigma = sqrt(mean((di − tier1_avg)2))
The combination of magnitude (tier1_avg) and spread (sigma) lets the tool distinguish, for example, a person who is uniformly thriving (high tier1_avg, low sigma) from one who is spiking on one or two dimensions while the others lag (high tier1_avg, high sigma) — two response patterns that produce nearly identical composite scores but very different lived realities.
Archetype matching and the 6 archetypes
Archetypes are pattern-based summaries of the 9-dimension Tier 1 profile — intended to help a user recognize their flourishing shape at a glance, not just their flourishing height. They are descriptive heuristics, not diagnostic categories. Two people with the same composite score can be in very different archetypes depending on the spread of their Tier 1 dimensions.
The matching logic is sequential — the first rule that matches wins — so Adrift always takes priority as a care-aware safety routing. The full decision tree, in order:
The Adrift
Care-aware override based only on the direct q14 response. This is supportive emphasis, not screening, crisis detection, diagnosis, monitoring, or risk classification. It is the only archetype that displaces other matching rules; support options are surfaced above the rest of the assessment.
The Anchored
A high Tier 1 average with low spread across the nine core areas. This owner-authored label describes only the current response pattern; it does not estimate rarity, stability, resources, prognosis, or population standing.
The Thriving
A high Tier 1 average with moderate spread across the nine core areas. This owner-authored label describes only the current response pattern; it does not estimate prevalence, stability, prognosis, or what a person typically knows.
The Spiked
A high Tier 1 average with greater spread across the nine core areas. The label makes the uneven pattern visible but does not identify a deficit, cause, priority, or the action most likely to help.
The Holding
A Tier 1 average in the owner-defined 5.0–7.4 interval. “Holding” is a descriptive name for this response, not a global modal category, forecast, or claim that an intervention will change it.
The Strained
A Tier 1 average below the owner-defined 5.0 threshold. “Strained” is a descriptive LBL heuristic, not a population comparison, diagnosis, crisis classification, prognosis, or claim about young adults.
What the matching rule compares: magnitude and spread
A composite score alone tells you the user's elevation. The standard deviation across dimensions tells you the user's shape. Two users with composite = 7.5 can have radically different lived realities: one is uniformly resourced across all 9 dimensions (Anchored); the other is at 9.5 on three dimensions and 4.5 on three others (Spiked). The same single number, two different lives.
The σ thresholds (1.2 and 1.8) are owner-authored display rules. They are not quantile cuts, population bands, prevalence estimates, clinical thresholds, or validated predictors; the labels are unvalidated, non-normative descriptive heuristics.
Your stated outlook (no prediction)
What the chart plots
The first point is the complete 25-answer composite. The second and third points are q13 and q14 exactly as entered. Future outlook remains separate and user-stated: the line does not estimate a future score, apply a population trend, or infer a likely outcome.
When the direct q14 response is 2 or below, the chart gives way to the care-aware support presentation. That branch is based only on q14; q13, d7, the composite, and any inferred pattern cannot activate it.
Historical model boundary
Inactive history: the pre-PR127 donor contained projection weights, country-age drift, divergence templates, and prediction language. LBL-FI v2.2 does not execute or display that model. No longitudinal validation supports transferring those formulas into a person-level prediction.
The original visual form is retained because it makes the three entered/current values easy to compare. Its motion is presentation only. It does not add evidence, probability, confidence, causal interpretation, or a validated change threshold.
Historical Flourishing Age display (inactive)
Why the comparison is disabled
The owner-authored LBL-FI uses 25 prompts and 16 display areas. The Global Flourishing Study (GFS) uses a different research instrument and sampling design. A shared 0–10 display range is not a validated crosswalk, and GFS has not published country × age × LBL-FI norms. Constructed or interpolated values therefore cannot be presented as norms for this tool.
The restored result card stays visible as historical interface context, but it reads “Not calculated” and receives no respondent data. It must not be interpreted as age equivalence, years ahead or behind, a population rank, prognosis, or a statement about how a person compares with peers.
What the 2026 GFS cohort update does establish
GFS includes more than 200,000 participants across 22 countries; the initial cohort numbered 202,898. Waves 2 and 3 are complete. The 2026 cohort update reports Wave 2 retention of 62.0% and Wave 3 retention of 53.6%: 96,684 respondents completed all three waves, while 14,802 skipped Wave 2 and returned for Wave 3.
Repeated GFS observations support within-person change analyses using GFS measures. They do not validate this different, owner-authored 25-prompt LBL instrument, establish an external norm or threshold for it, or predict an individual LBL-FI score or outcome. The LBL instrument is not equivalent to, a validated substitute for, or a validated extension of the GFS or any other cited scale, including the FI, SFI, PERMA-Profiler, Diener Flourishing Scale, Ryff PWB, and MHC-SF. Those GFS country, demographic, threshold, and within-person findings are not transferred to LBL-FI.
Sources: 2025 Wave 1 profile and initial results; 2026 cohort update.
What is empirical vs. LBL judgment
This section exists because v2.2 is honest about a fact that wellbeing tools often hide: some of the parameters in this scoring pipeline are not empirically derived constants. Stating this explicitly so the reader is not misled into thinking everything is data-driven.
Empirically grounded
- The 16 construct definitions are drawn from peer-reviewed literature (Ryff, VanderWeele, Snyder, Ersner-Hershfield, Deci & Ryan, Whillans, Waldinger). The wording of items is LBL-original, but the underlying constructs the items operationalize are well-established.
- The arithmetic operations — means, standard deviations, weighted averages — are mathematical primitives with no proprietary content.
- GFS cohort facts describe that study's own participants and measures. They are presented as research context only and are not transferred into LBL-FI scoring, norms, thresholds, or predictions.
- The direct q14 presentation rule (q14 ≤ 2) is a conservative LBL-authored support boundary. It is not a validated threshold and is not derived from GFS.
LBL working judgment
- The 80/20 Tier 1 / Tier 2 composite weighting reflects our judgment that core dimensions are load-bearing and contextual dimensions are modifiers. It is not derived from a published factor-analytic fit. A reasonable researcher might choose 75/25 or 85/15.
- The archetype σ thresholds (1.2 and 1.8) are owner-authored display rules. They are not quantile cuts, population bands, prevalence estimates, clinical thresholds, or validated predictors.
- The stated-outlook chart plots the complete current composite with q13 and q14 exactly as entered. It applies no trajectory weights, population drift, regression, or person-level prediction.
These values will be revised when convergent-validity and longitudinal data are available. The instrument is in active development; convergent-validity studies against the Diener Satisfaction With Life Scale and Ryff's PWB Scales are planned but not yet complete.
Direct-response support boundary
Item q14 asks about confidence in having lived a life worth living. That wording is not a validated question about suicidal thoughts, intent, plan, or immediate danger. The tool cannot infer a crisis from q14, from the grouped d7 value, or from the overall result.
Direct q14 rule: when q14 is at or below 2, the page shows a support message in direct response to that answer. This is a conservative LBL presentation rule, not a validated risk threshold. The broader d7 score does not trigger the message.
This is not screening, crisis detection, monitoring, diagnosis, or risk classification. The page does not alert anyone.
Call or text 988 in the U.S.; text HOME to 741741 through Crisis Text Line; or find local options at Find A Helpline. If there is immediate danger, contact local emergency services now.
Privacy, transmission & persistence
Ordinary scoring is page memory only: raw item responses and derived results remain in the page’s working memory while the page is open. Ordinary scoring does not send answers, area values, or the composite to a LifeByLogic server.
- No automatic persistence: the tool does not automatically write responses or results to localStorage, sessionStorage, cookies, an account, or a server.
- Optional account save: only an explicit Save action offers the composite and 16 derived area values to LifeGraph+. The 25 individual answers are not included. If sign-in is required, the user-initiated flow may temporarily place that derived result in sessionStorage so it can resume after authentication.
- Paid handoff disabled: this version does not write or transfer a result payload for paid-report checkout.
- Analytics boundary: page analytics do not receive item answers, scores, or results.
Copying a derived summary is also user-initiated. Browser extensions, shared devices, screenshots, and device-level logging are outside the page’s control. See the Privacy Policy for site-wide practices.
Limitations & open questions
What this tool does not measure
Several important things are deliberately out of scope:
- Clinical mental health conditions. The tool produces a 0–10 Mental Health dimension score; this is a functional self-report, not a clinical screen. Users worried about depression, anxiety, or other mental health concerns should consult a qualified clinician.
- Trauma history and chronic illness. Both are real and load-bearing for well-being; neither is captured in 25 items. A self-report on present-day flourishing cannot replace a careful clinical history.
- Cognitive function. The LBL Brain Age Index and Cognitive Reserve Estimator address this domain.
- Specific relationship quality. The Close Relationships dimension captures presence-and-reciprocity, not the quality of any specific relationship.
- Spiritual or religious meaning, specifically. Captured indirectly through Meaning & Purpose (d6) and Inner Life (d3), but the tool does not assess religious or spiritual practice specifically.
What this tool has not yet done
- Convergent-validity studies. Planned but not complete. We intend to test LBL-FI against the Diener Satisfaction With Life Scale and Ryff's PWB Scales in a non-commercial research sample.
- Test-retest reliability. Not yet established empirically. The instrument is built for stability of the constructs measured, but the actual two-week stability coefficient has not been calculated.
- Cross-cultural validation. Items are written in English with American cultural anchoring. Cross-cultural adaptation work is on the long-term roadmap but not yet underway.
- Independent factor analysis. The Tier 1 / Tier 2 structure reflects theoretical rationale, not factor-analytic fit. A proper exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis of the 25 items is a clear next step.
Honest framing of the user's experience
A score of 8.6 does not mean the user is flourishing 86% as much as some maximum-flourishing reference person. It means the user's average response across 16 dimensions falls in the upper part of the response range, with the displayed-composite weighting applied. The same is true at the low end: a score of 2.6 means the user is currently in a low-resource state across most dimensions — not that the user is “26%” of anything, and not that this state is fixed.
The tool's results are orientation devices: a snapshot of the present, useful for identifying patterns and informing next steps, not a verdict on the user.
Frequently asked questions
Common questions about the tool, the methodology, and how to interpret your result.
What is the LBL Flourishing Index?
The LBL Flourishing Index (LBL-FI) is an LBL-original 25-item self-assessment that measures 16 dimensions of human flourishing across two tiers. Nine core dimensions drive the composite score and archetype assignment; seven contextual dimensions add an awareness layer. It is an educational decision-support tool, not a clinical screener, and is released under CC BY-NC 4.0 for free non-commercial use with attribution.
How is the flourishing score calculated?
Scoring runs in four stages. Stage 1: each Tier 1 dimension except d7 averages its two items; d7 retains the original weighted rule (0.4 × q13) + (0.6 × q14); each Tier 2 dimension uses its single item. Stage 2: the Tier 1 average is the unweighted mean of the 9 core dimensions; the Tier 2 average is the unweighted mean of the 7 contextual dimensions. Stage 3: the displayed composite weights Tier 1 at 0.8 and Tier 2 at 0.2. Stage 4: for archetype assignment, the tool computes the standard deviation across the 9 Tier 1 dimensions and uses both the Tier 1 average and that σ to classify the response pattern.
What are the 16 dimensions measured?
Tier 1 (9 core): Joy and Life Satisfaction, Mental Health, Inner Life and Self-Awareness, Personal Growth, Physical Health and Vitality, Meaning and Purpose, Prospective Self-Continuity and Hope, Close Relationships, and Material Security.
Tier 2 (7 contextual): Integrity, Service, Community, Autonomy, Work, Time Freedom, and Environmental Fit. The framework synthesizes the Global Flourishing Study, Ryff's PWB model, Snyder's Hope Theory, Ersner-Hershfield's future-self continuity work, and Self-Determination Theory.
What are the 6 archetypes?
The Anchored (high, even), Thriving (high, slightly varied), Spiked (high but uneven), Holding (mid-range, the modal global pattern), Strained (multiple dimensions below typical), and Adrift (care-aware override based only on a direct q14 response of 2 or below). Archetypes are descriptive heuristics, not diagnostic categories. The Adrift archetype always takes priority as a safety routing.
Is the LBL Flourishing Index clinically validated?
No. The LBL Flourishing Index has not undergone large-scale psychometric validation as of v2.2. Items are LBL-original, scoring is transparent, and convergent-validity studies against the Diener Satisfaction With Life Scale and Ryff's PWB Scales are planned but not yet complete. The tool is intended for educational decision support and is not a clinical screener or diagnostic instrument. For clinical assessment, use a validated measure under the guidance of a qualified clinician.
How does the Adrift archetype work?
The Adrift archetype is a care-aware presentation override based only on a direct q14 response at or below 2. It surfaces support options and skips the trajectory illustration. This rule is not screening, crisis detection, diagnosis, monitoring, or risk classification; the tool cannot determine whether someone is in crisis.
What is Flourishing Age?
Flourishing Age is a historical exploratory display that matches a composite to a constructed country-by-age reference table. It is not a validated comparison: LBL-FI and GFS are different instruments. Because v2.2 does not collect country or age context in the assessment, this comparison remains unavailable in the current privacy-preserving experience.
What is empirically grounded vs. LBL judgment?
Literature-grounded and arithmetic: the cited construct traditions and the transparent operations used to summarize this response (means, standard deviations, and the disclosed weighted average). GFS facts describe GFS only; no country-level LBL-FI comparison is active.
LBL working values: the original item wording, 80/20 Tier 1 / Tier 2 weighting, and the σ thresholds (1.2 and 1.8) used for descriptive archetype matching. The outlook chart contains no prediction model; it connects current arithmetic with the user's stated q13 and q14 values.
Can I use the LBL Flourishing Index in research?
The instrument is released under CC BY-NC 4.0 for non-commercial reuse with attribution, but that license is not evidence of measurement validity. Do not use LBL-FI as a research instrument, trial endpoint, clinical screen, or population-monitoring measure. Select a validated instrument whose population, language, licensing, and administration conditions fit the study question.
What does the trajectory chart predict?
The trajectory chart is an explicitly unvalidated illustration, not a person-level prediction. Its two displayed calculations retain the original weights: the five-year line uses 50% current composite, 30% d7, and 20% constructed drift; the end-of-life line uses 30% composite, 50% d7, and 20% constructed drift. It compares those calculations with q13 and q14 and is skipped when the direct q14 support rule fires.
Who developed the LBL Flourishing Index?
The LBL Flourishing Index was developed by Abiot Y. Derbie, PhD, a cognitive neuroscientist and the founder of LifeByLogic. The instrument synthesizes evidence from the Global Flourishing Study, Ryff's PWB model, Snyder's Hope Theory, Ersner-Hershfield's future-self continuity work, and Self-Determination Theory. It is published by LifeByLogic, an independent publication of evidence-based interactive tools owned and operated by Nexus Decision Systems LLC.
Is my data private?
Ordinary scoring runs in page memory and does not transmit answers, scores, or results. Nothing is saved automatically. An explicit account Save action can send only the composite and 16 derived area values; the 25 individual answers are excluded. Copying is also user-initiated. Standard site-wide privacy disclosures still apply.
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Open the LBL Flourishing Index →References
Full bibliography of works cited in this methodology. DOIs and URLs are provided where the work has a verified persistent identifier. All references have been verified against their canonical sources.
- VanderWeele, T. J. (2017). On the promotion of human flourishing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(31), 8148–8156. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1702996114
- VanderWeele, T. J., Johnson, B. R., Bialowolski, P. T., et al. (2025). The Global Flourishing Study: Study profile and initial results on flourishing. Nature Mental Health, April 30, 2025 release. doi.org/10.1038/s44220-025-00423-5
- Ryff, C. D. (1989). Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(6), 1069–1081. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.57.6.1069
- Snyder, C. R., Harris, C., Anderson, J. R., Holleran, S. A., Irving, L. M., Sigmon, S. T., et al. (1991). The will and the ways: Development and validation of an individual-differences measure of hope. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(4), 570–585. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.60.4.570
- Ersner-Hershfield, H., Garton, M. T., Ballard, K., Samanez-Larkin, G. R., & Knutson, B. (2009). Don't stop thinking about tomorrow: Individual differences in future self-continuity account for saving. Judgment and Decision Making, 4(4), 280–286.
- Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268. doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01
- Weziak-Bialowolska, D., McNeely, E., & VanderWeele, T. J. (2019). Flourish Index and Secure Flourish Index: validation in workplace settings. Cogent Psychology, 6(1), 1598926. doi.org/10.1080/23311908.2019.1598926
- VanderWeele, T. J., McNeely, E., & Koh, H. K. (2019). Reimagining health — flourishing. JAMA, 321(17), 1667–1668. doi.org/10.1001/jama.2019.3035
- VanderWeele, T. J. (2020). Activities for flourishing: An evidence-based guide. Journal of Positive Psychology and Wellbeing, 4(1), 79–91. hfh.fas.harvard.edu/publications
- Waldinger, R. J., & Schulz, M. S. (2023). The good life: Lessons from the world's longest scientific study of happiness. Simon & Schuster. Findings from the Harvard Study of Adult Development. adultdevelopmentstudy.org
- Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E. (2001). Crafting a job: Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 179–201. doi.org/10.5465/amr.2001.4378011
- Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., Baker, M., Harris, T., & Stephenson, D. (2015). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: a meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 227–237. doi.org/10.1177/1745691614568352
- Global Flourishing Study. Wave 1 country-level data releases and methodology documentation. Retrieved from globalflourishingstudy.com. Multi-institution project coordinated by the Center for Open Science, Baylor University, and Gallup, in partnership with the Harvard Human Flourishing Program.
- Harvard Human Flourishing Program. Measuring flourishing: overview, instruments, and validation materials. Retrieved from hfh.fas.harvard.edu/measuring-flourishing. Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University.
Related and applied guides
Use What Is Human Flourishing? for established definitions, models, and instruments. Use How to Interpret a Flourishing Profile for a pattern-first way to read one LBL response.
These four fixed guides examine specific contexts without treating an LBL rating as a diagnosis, cause, or recommendation:
- Flourishing at workSeparate personal experience from work conditions and organizational responsibility.
- Time affluence vs time povertyDistinguish hours, sufficiency, control, fragmentation, and structure.
- Autonomy and well-beingDistinguish volition from independence, control, and number of choices.
- Helping others and well-beingReview benefits, burden, recipient fit, and sustainable boundaries.
Navigation boundary: these four links are fixed for every reader. They are not selected from answers or results, and their presence does not identify a personal deficit, priority, or expected outcome.
Citation & version log
How to cite this work
If you reference the LBL Flourishing Index in academic, educational, or professional work, please use one of the following formats:
APA: LifeByLogic. (2026). LBL Flourishing Index: A 16-dimension self-assessment of human flourishing (Version 2.2) [Web application]. https://lifebylogic.com/life-dashboard/flourishing-index
MLA: LifeByLogic. “LBL Flourishing Index: A 16-Dimension Self-Assessment of Human Flourishing.” Version 2.2, 2026, lifebylogic.com/life-dashboard/flourishing-index.
Chicago: LifeByLogic. 2026. “LBL Flourishing Index: A 16-Dimension Self-Assessment of Human Flourishing.” Version 2.2. Accessed [date]. https://lifebylogic.com/life-dashboard/flourishing-index.
Version log
- v2.2 — September 9, 2026
- Restored the original detailed 16-area experience and original d7 weighting; retained later interpretation, support, newsletter-consent, and explicit account-save boundaries; repaired answer commitment and live rail feedback. Saved v2.1 and v2.2 derived results remain readable.
- v2.1 — August 29, 2026
- Historical interim presentation. Existing v2.1 derived saves remain supported for continuity.
- v2.0 — May 14, 2026
- Original 16-dimension, two-tier release with 25 items, six descriptive archetypes, detailed results, and full empirical-versus-judgment disclosure.
- v1.0 — May 2, 2026
- Initial 12-item, six-domain release; superseded by the owner-authored 16-area instrument.
About the author
Abiot Y. Derbie, PhD, is a cognitive neuroscientist and the founder of LifeByLogic. His academic research focuses on neuroplasticity, brain development, and neurodevelopmental outcomes; he holds postdoctoral appointments and has published in peer-reviewed neuroscience journals on multimodal neuroimaging and machine learning methods. LifeByLogic is an independent publication of evidence-based interactive tools, owned and operated by Nexus Decision Systems LLC.
Questions about this methodology can be sent to hello@lifebylogic.com. Corrections should be submitted via the corrections page.