Flourishing Index Methodology

The Flourishing Index estimates how well a person is faring across the major domains of human well-being identified in the contemporary research literature. The output is a composite score (0-10), a per-domain breakdown, and an interpretive view of which domains are pulling the composite up and which are pulling it down. The tool implements the Secure Flourish Index (SFI) developed by Tyler J. VanderWeele and the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“Flourishing” in this framework is broader than “happiness.” 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. The Secure Flourish Index treats well-being as multidimensional and refuses to collapse it to a single metric without first showing the user where they stand on each dimension separately.

For most of the twentieth century, well-being research followed two largely separate traditions: hedonic research focused on positive affect and life satisfaction, and eudaimonic research focused on meaning, virtue, and human functioning in the Aristotelian sense. By the early 2000s, scholars had begun arguing that any adequate measure of human flourishing needed to integrate both. VanderWeele's 2017 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “On the promotion of human flourishing,” was a major contribution to that integration: it proposed a five-domain (Flourish Index) and six-domain (Secure Flourish Index) framework that has since been adopted in workplace research, medical training assessment, and the Global Flourishing Study, a longitudinal effort tracking more than 200,000 participants across 22 countries.

Why does this matter for an individual user? Because the dominant cultural conversation about well-being conflates flourishing with happiness, and the dominant clinical conversation reduces it to the absence of psychiatric symptoms. Both compressions miss real dimensions of how people actually experience their lives. A multidimensional measure surfaces those dimensions, making it possible to notice that, for example, your social relationships are strong but your sense of meaning is depleted — an actionable distinction that single-number measures obscure.

The tool implements the 12-item Secure Flourish Index (SFI) directly, with two items per domain across the six domains.

The first five domains constitute the original Flourish Index (FI), which VanderWeele argues are each “arguably at least a part of what we mean by flourishing” and each constitutes an end in itself. The five are: happiness and life satisfaction; mental and physical health; meaning and purpose; character and virtue; and close social relationships. The sixth domain, financial and material stability, is added to form the SFI. Financial stability is treated not as an end in itself but as an enabling condition for sustaining flourishing in the other five domains over time. Whether to include it depends on one's theoretical commitments; we display both the FI (5-domain) and SFI (6-domain) results so users can see what difference financial stability makes to their composite.

The 12-item SFI has been psychometrically validated in workplace settings (Węziak-Białowolska, McNeely, & VanderWeele, 2019, Cogent Psychology), in cross-cultural comparison across the United States, China, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, and Mexico, and most recently in the Global Flourishing Study questionnaire development (2025). Reliability coefficients (Cronbach's alpha) typically exceed 0.85 for the composite. Confirmatory factor analysis supports the six-domain structure across populations.

The algorithm follows VanderWeele's published scoring procedure exactly.

Step one: per-domain scoring. For each of the six domains, the user answers two items on a 0-to-10 scale where extreme categories are labeled (e.g., 0 = “not satisfied at all,” 10 = “completely satisfied”). The two item scores within a domain are averaged to produce a domain score, also on the 0-10 scale.

Step two: composite scoring. The Flourish Index composite is the arithmetic mean of the first five domain scores, with equal weighting. The Secure Flourish Index composite is the arithmetic mean of all six domain scores, also with equal weighting. Both composites range from 0.0 to 10.0.

Step three: interpretation. The tool surfaces three views: the SFI composite, the FI composite, and the per-domain breakdown. The per-domain view is the actionable surface — it shows where the user is high, where they are low, and how much each domain is pulling the composite. The composite is the headline number, but VanderWeele explicitly notes that the per-domain dynamics “can be quite different across domains” and should not be averaged away.

The table below gives the operational definition of each domain, the items used, and the source for each.

All items are public-domain, drawn from the Human Flourishing Program's published 12-item measure. We use VanderWeele's exact item wording where it is unambiguous in plain English, and we use minor accessibility-driven rephrasing where the original items were academic in tone (with documented equivalence; the published validation studies have shown that minor phrasing adjustments preserve construct validity within reasonable bounds).

The Global Flourishing Study, a five-year longitudinal study coordinated by Harvard and Baylor that follows more than 200,000 participants across 22 countries, provides the most comprehensive normative reference. Initial baseline results, published 2024-2025, show meaningful country-level variation in composite scores and in domain rankings. We do not surface country-specific benchmarks because the GFS data is still being released and because the tool is intended for individual reflection rather than comparative ranking. We do indicate that adult composite scores in working-age populations typically fall in the 6.0-8.0 range, with the median around 7, and that scores below 5 in any single domain warrant attention.

Reference age range: 18 and above. The SFI items have been validated in adolescent populations as well, but we restrict to adults given that several items (financial stability, character and virtue) are calibrated to adult life contexts.

The SFI is a self-report instrument. Like all self-reports, it is subject to social desirability bias, recall bias, and momentary mood effects. A user completing the tool on a particularly bad day will score lower than they would on average; a user completing it after a positive event will score higher. A single result is therefore best understood as a snapshot, and the per-domain view is the more useful surface than the composite for any single sitting.

The SFI does not capture every dimension of well-being that has been theorized in the literature. It does not measure spiritual or religious well-being directly (though aspects appear within meaning and purpose), does not measure environmental well-being or connection to nature, and does not capture political agency or civic engagement. VanderWeele explicitly acknowledges that the six domains are “not necessarily exhaustive” and that other dimensions may also be important. The tool is one validated framework among several reasonable choices, not the framework.

The composite score is a mean. A composite of 7.0 can result from uniform 7s across all domains or from a mix of 9s and 5s. The per-domain breakdown is what makes the composite interpretable. Users who fixate on the composite without examining the per-domain pattern are missing the point of a multidimensional measure.

Finally: the SFI is a measure of well-being, not a diagnostic instrument. A low score does not constitute a clinical diagnosis. If the score reflects sustained low mood, hopelessness, or significant functional impairment, please consult a qualified mental health professional.

The analytical modeling and results-analysis logic of this tool is independently reviewed by a domain expert in computational modeling and statistical methods. The reviewer validates that tool outputs faithfully implement the cited peer-reviewed methodology. See our About page for reviewer credentials.

• v1.0 (May 2, 2026) — Initial public release. Implements VanderWeele's 12-item Secure Flourish Index with the three-step algorithm described above.

• VanderWeele, T. J. (2017). On the promotion of human flourishing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(31), 8148–8156. doi:10.1073/pnas.1702996114
• Węziak-Białowolska, D., McNeely, E., & VanderWeele, T. J. (2019). Flourish Index and Secure Flourish Index — Validation in workplace settings. Cogent Psychology, 6(1), 1598926.
• Crabtree, S., et al. (2025). The development of the Global Flourishing Study questionnaire: charting the evolution of a new 109-item inventory of human flourishing. BMC Global and Public Health, 3, 31.
• Höltge, J., et al. (2023). Multidimensional human flourishing in cross-cultural settings. SSM — Population Health, 21, 101316.
• Lomas, T., & VanderWeele, T. J. (2023). The Garden and the Orchestra: Generative metaphors for conceptualizing the complexities of well-being. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20(14), 6347.

The constructs measured by this tool, defined in the LifeByLogic glossary:

Browse the full glossary →

• Take the Flourishing Index — the tool itself.
• About the author — Abiot Y. Derbie, PhD.
• LifeByLogic editorial policy — how all our methodology is sourced, reviewed, and disclosed.