Twelve items across six domains, the closest brief instrument to flourishing in the full sense rather than wellbeing alone. A slow, long-cycle anchor.
| Full name | The Flourishing Measure. Scored as the Flourish Index (ten items) and the Secure Flourish Index (all twelve) |
| What it measures | Flourishing across six domains: happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, financial and material stability |
| Items and time | Twelve items, two per domain, about three minutes |
| Response scale | 0 to 10 on every item, with only the end points labelled |
| Recall period | None fixed. Mostly “these days” and “in general” |
| Score range | 0 to 10 per domain and overall. Some studies sum instead, 0 to 100 and 0 to 120 |
| Developed by | Tyler VanderWeele, Human Flourishing Program, Harvard, 2017 |
| Cost and licence | Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0. Free for non-commercial use with citation. Commercial use licensed through Harvard’s Flourishing Hub |
| Languages | Many, through the Global Flourishing Study and local validations |
| Ages | Adults. Used from 18 in the large studies |
| Best used for | A long-cycle anchor, six-monthly or yearly. Domain profiles |
| Pair with | A brief change-sensitive measure for the short cycle, and indicators specific to the setting |
Twelve questions, two for each of six domains, and the closest thing we have to a brief measure of flourishing in the full sense rather than wellbeing in the narrow one. It is the instrument behind the Global Flourishing Study, which since 2025 has been reporting on more than 200,000 people in 22 countries. If a governance framework says an AI system should support human flourishing, this is the measure that comes nearest to what those words mean. It is also, for the same reason, slow.
Do not confuse it with Diener’s Flourishing Scale, which is eight items and a different instrument. People do, constantly.
The measure is free to reproduce for non-commercial use with attribution, so here they are, grouped by domain.
Happiness and life satisfaction. Overall, how satisfied are you with life as a whole these days? (0 not satisfied at all, 10 completely satisfied.) In general, how happy or unhappy do you usually feel? (0 extremely unhappy, 10 extremely happy.)
Mental and physical health. In general, how would you rate your physical health? How would you rate your overall mental health? (Both 0 poor, 10 excellent.)
Meaning and purpose. Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile? (0 not at all worthwhile, 10 completely worthwhile.) I understand my purpose in life. (0 strongly disagree, 10 strongly agree.)
Character and virtue. I always act to promote good in all circumstances, even in difficult and challenging situations. I am always able to give up some happiness now for greater happiness later. (Both 0 not true of me, 10 completely true of me.)
Close social relationships. I am content with my friendships and relationships. My relationships are as satisfying as I would want them to be. (Both 0 strongly disagree, 10 strongly agree.)
Financial and material stability. How often do you worry about being able to meet normal monthly living expenses? How often do you worry about safety, food, or housing? (Both 0 worry all of the time, 10 do not ever worry.)
The items were chosen, where possible, from questions already in use in large surveys, so several of them will be familiar from the ONS wellbeing questions and from Gallup. The two character items are worded very strongly (always, in all circumstances) and they behave differently from the rest, which comes up again under invariance. The financial items are scored so that higher is less worry, which is easy to get backwards when entering data.
VanderWeele set out the framework in a 2017 paper in PNAS. The argument was that flourishing is a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good, that at least five domains are things nearly everyone wants as ends in themselves, and that policy measurement had attended to income and health while neglecting the rest. He added a sixth domain, financial and material stability, on the reasoning that flourishing which the next shock could take away is not yet secure.
Hence two indices. The Flourish Index uses the first five domains and the Secure Flourish Index all six. The paper also reviewed the longitudinal evidence on what promotes these domains and settled on four pathways: family, work, education and religious community, which is why the measure turns up so often in research on those institutions.
Score every item 0 to 10 as answered. For each domain, average its two items. That gives six domain scores from 0 to 10. The Flourish Index is the average of the first five domain scores, and the Secure Flourish Index the average of all six, each again from 0 to 10. That is the scoring in the validation papers. VanderWeele’s original paper also described summing the items instead, which gives 0 to 100 for the ten-item index and 0 to 120 for the twelve, and you will meet both conventions in the literature. Whichever you use, the Harvard guidance is to report the six domain scores separately and to treat the overall average as a crude summary only.
Read the profile first. Two groups with the same overall score can have entirely different shapes, one high on relationships and low on meaning, the other the other way round, and the shape is where the information is. There are no clinical cut-offs and nobody should invent any. Within a group over time, movement in one domain means more than movement in the average, because whatever has changed in people’s lives tends to act on particular domains rather than evenly across all six.
For a sense of scale, the Global Flourishing Study’s first wave found Indonesia, Mexico and the Philippines near the top of the country rankings and Japan, Türkiye and the United Kingdom near the bottom, with the United States and Sweden in the middle. The study’s authors are careful about those comparisons, for reasons that come next, and so should anyone using the measure be. The same study found flourishing roughly flat from age 18 to 49 and rising with each decade after 50 in the pooled data, although the pattern differs a lot between countries, and in several wealthy English-speaking ones young adults now report lower wellbeing than older ones.
Two validation papers by Węziak-Białowolska, McNeely and VanderWeele, both in 2019, did the main work. The first, in Cogent Psychology, tested the indices on 5,565 office and factory employees of two large US manufacturers. The six-domain structure held, with a higher-order flourishing factor sitting above the domains, internal consistency was in the range of about 0.80 to 0.90, and invariance across employee groups and across time supported comparing scores within that population.
The second, in Frontiers in Psychology, is the one to read if you plan to use the measure across cultures. It tested 8,873 adults in the United States, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Cambodia and China. The structure held everywhere. Metric invariance held, so the items load on their domains similarly across countries. But full scalar invariance did not. The intercepts for meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and health had to be freed, which means people in different countries use the response scale differently on those domains, and mean scores on them cannot be compared across countries without care. Reliabilities ranged from 0.76 to 0.91. The substantive pattern was telling in itself. Americans scored highest on financial security and happiness and lowest on nearly everything else. China was highest on health and relationships. Mexico was lowest on financial stability and highest on meaning and purpose.
Since then the Global Flourishing Study, run by Harvard and Baylor with Gallup, has used the measure (inside a much longer questionnaire) with nationally representative samples in 22 countries, and will follow the same people for five years. Its first-wave papers appeared in Nature Mental Health in 2025. That makes it the best-resourced flourishing dataset in existence, and the natural reference point for anyone using the measure.
The twelve-item measure is the standard. There is no short form, since two items per domain is already the minimum, and anyone who wants more depth in a particular domain can borrow from the much longer Global Flourishing Study questionnaire, which is public. Translations exist in every language the Global Flourishing Study used and in others through local validations. The measure is licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0, so it is free for non-commercial use provided VanderWeele’s 2017 paper is cited, and commercial users license it through Harvard’s Flourishing Hub.
It is the only brief measure that covers character and physical health alongside the usual wellbeing domains, which is what makes it a measure of flourishing rather than of mood or satisfaction. It has large, multi-country validation and a growing global reference dataset. Its items are plain, familiar and quick. And the domain structure gives you a profile rather than a number, which is what you want when the question is what, if anything, an AI system is doing to people’s lives.
Two items per domain is a keyhole. A domain score can shift on the wording of one question, so small changes in one domain in a small group should be read cautiously, and a domain like character and virtue is being asked to carry a lot on two strongly worded items.
The measure assumes a reasonably stable life in which flourishing changes slowly, and it does. That is why it works as an anchor and why it works badly as a sensor. Measure it at baseline and four weeks later and you will usually learn nothing, and you may conclude wrongly that nothing happened. It needs six months or a year between readings, which means it needs a shorter, quicker companion for the time in between.
Cross-cultural comparison needs the invariance evidence to back it, and for three of the six domains that evidence says be careful. The authors of the measure say this themselves about the Global Flourishing Study’s country rankings. The measure also comes from a particular tradition. The six domains are a Western academic account of a good life, and communities with their own frameworks, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social and emotional wellbeing and Māori models of health, define wellbeing through domains this measure does not have, connection to Country and to ancestors among them. Using it in those settings is a decision that belongs to the community, not to the person doing the measuring.
And for anyone using it around an AI system, the measure has no items on attention, autonomy, capability, dependency or judgement. A system could change all of those and the Flourishing Measure would see it only once the change reached one of the six domains, which may be a long time later. It also cannot tell you whether someone is flourishing with the system’s help or would be flourishing without it. Both of those are the same lesson: measure the domains with this, and measure the pathway with something else.
I would use it as the long-cycle anchor in any study that runs a year or more, at baseline and then every six or twelve months, and I would report the six domains every time. It is the right instrument when you need to speak the language of flourishing to a board or a regulator, and the wrong one for a quick check. Pair it with the WHO-5 or the short WEMWBS for the short cycle, and with one or two indicators chosen for the setting so that you can see change on the way to the domains rather than only on arrival.
The measure, scoring notes and licence terms are at the Human Flourishing Program’s page, hfh.fas.harvard.edu/measuring-flourishing.
The founding paper is VanderWeele, T. J. (2017), On the promotion of human flourishing, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(31), 8148–8156, pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1702996114.
The validations are Węziak-Białowolska, D., McNeely, E. and 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, and the same authors (2019), Human flourishing in cross cultural settings. Evidence from the United States, China, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, and Mexico, Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1269, doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01269.
For the Global Flourishing Study, start at Harvard’s summary of the first wave, hsph.harvard.edu/news/measuring-a-life-well-lived, and follow the links to the Nature Mental Health papers.