A Six-Domain Definition of Complete Human Flourishing (VanderWeele, 2017)

The Question

Existing well-being scales each cover a slice of flourishing. Could a single short instrument capture the whole picture, including the parts other measures leave out?

What They Found

• VanderWeele defined complete flourishing as five domains: happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and close social relationships
• He then added financial and material stability as a sixth domain, arguing that someone who cannot reliably pay rent or feed their family is not flourishing, no matter how meaningful their work feels
• Each domain is measured by 2 questions on a 0 to 10 scale; the composite is the mean of all 12 items, which is also the mean of the 6 domain scores
• Items were drawn from validated scales (the Satisfaction with Life Scale, Cantril's ladder, established meaning measures) so each line of the index is anchored in prior psychometric work
• The framework was built to be cross-culturally usable and short enough for population surveys, which is what later enabled the Global Flourishing Study to deploy it across 22 countries

How They Tested It

• Reviewed the philosophical and empirical literature on well-being to identify which domains a complete account of flourishing must include
• Selected 2 items per domain from validated instruments, so each pair could stand alone or roll up into a composite
• Proposed two related measures: the Flourish Index (10 items, 5 domains) and the Secure Flourish Index (12 items, with the 2 financial items added)
• Published the framework in PNAS as a position paper, with the empirical validation work delegated to Weziak-Bialowolska et al. (2019) and later large-scale studies

Caveats

• The 2017 paper is a conceptual proposal, not a psychometric validation. The empirical evidence accumulated in subsequent papers, not in this one
• The Character & Virtue domain is openly normative and assumes a moral framework that not every respondent shares; self-report on virtue is biased upward in every culture
• With only 2 items per domain, each domain score is less precise than a longer subscale and cannot be decomposed into finer facets like a 23-item PERMA profile

How Reborn Helps

Reborn's Harvard Flourishing Index uses VanderWeele's 12-item Secure Flourish Index unchanged so you can see your full six-domain shape, not just a single happiness number.