For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about a study investigating the interplay of well-being factors across global populations.
How and why do people’s happiness, health, purpose, faith, virtue, and relationships change over the course of their lives? How do these aspects of what it means to be human vary within cultures and across countries? An ambitious multi-year, worldwide study will track 240,000 adults and teens in 22 countries to give researchers an unprecedented window into human well-being, providing data to answer those questions and many others. The Global Flourishing Study (GFS) will afford social scientists new opportunities to investigate questions about how love, generosity, forgiveness, religion, spirituality, and well-being change and interact across a broad array of human cultures and demographics.
Co-directed by sociologist Byron Johnson, of Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, and epidemiologist Tyler VanderWeele, of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the study will be carried out in partnership with the global polling firm Gallup and the Center for Open Science. The 5-year, $43.4-million project, which is launching with $11.1 million in funding from the John Templeton Foundation, will support five annual waves of data collection from the same respondents. Gallup will facilitate data collection and management, recruiting participants and following up with them each year, while the Center for Open Science will help make the data freely available to researchers, journalists, policymakers and educators.