Eight Items to Measure a Flourishing Life (Diener et al., 2010)

The Question

Could a pair of very short scales capture both eudaimonic flourishing and recent affect well enough to sit alongside the SWLS in a single survey?

What They Found

• The Flourishing Scale held together as a single factor across all eight items, capturing purpose, relationships, contribution, competence, and respect in one compact total
• Internal reliability for the Flourishing Scale was Cronbach's alpha of 0.87, on par with much longer eudaimonic instruments
• One-month test-retest reliability landed at 0.71, evidence that the score reflects a stable judgment rather than passing mood
• The Flourishing Scale correlated strongly with Ryff's Psychological Well-Being scales and with the SWLS, confirming convergent validity while staying short enough to slot into longer surveys
• The companion SPANE separated positive and negative feelings cleanly and gave a recent-affect read that the SWLS deliberately leaves out

How They Tested It

• Validation sample of 689 university students across multiple US campuses, with the Flourishing Scale answered on a 1 to 7 agree scale
• Compared scores against Ryff's Psychological Well-Being scales, Diener's own SWLS, and several positive-functioning measures to test convergent validity
• Re-administered the scale one month later in a subset to check whether scores stayed stable over time
• Ran factor analyses to confirm the eight items loaded onto a single flourishing dimension and that the SPANE split cleanly into positive and negative subscales

Caveats

• The original sample was overwhelmingly US college students, so the published norms tilt toward Western, educated, young populations; later international validations like Silva and Caetano (2013) filled in much of that gap
• It is a self-report scale, so it is vulnerable to social desirability bias, especially on item 6 (“I am a good person and live a good life”)
• With only one total score, the Flourishing Scale is less granular than the PERMA-Profiler; you cannot tell from the number which of the seven facets is lagging without inspecting individual items

How Reborn Helps

Reborn lets you take the Flourishing Scale in two minutes and see your total against the international mean, with Diener's original wording from the 2010 paper.