The Flourish Index Holds Up Across 1,011 Workers (Weziak-Bialowolska et al., 2019)

The Question

VanderWeele proposed the Flourish Index and Secure Flourish Index in 2017 as a conceptual framework. Did the actual psychometrics hold up when tested on real people?

What They Found

• Across 1,011 working adults, the six-domain structure replicated cleanly: each domain behaved as a coherent unit and the items grouped where VanderWeele predicted they would
• Internal reliability for the full Secure Flourish Index was high (Cronbach's alpha above 0.80), comparable to longer well-being scales
• The Financial & Material Stability items added unique information beyond the other five domains, supporting VanderWeele's 2017 argument that security belongs in any complete flourishing measure
• Flourish Index scores correlated as expected with health outcomes, job satisfaction, and engagement, and diverged from constructs they should not overlap with, supporting the index's validity
• The instrument was short enough (10 or 12 items) for routine workplace surveys, which the authors framed as the practical case for adopting it over longer scales

How They Tested It

• Surveyed 1,011 employees at a single large U.S. employer using the full Secure Flourish Index plus criterion measures (health, engagement, job satisfaction)
• Ran confirmatory factor analysis to test the six-domain structure against alternative groupings, including a single-factor model
• Tested convergent and discriminant validity by correlating each domain with established scales it should and should not track
• Compared the Flourish Index (10 items, 5 domains) and the Secure Flourish Index (12 items, 6 domains) head to head to evaluate whether the financial items earned their slot

Caveats

• Validation was on a single workplace sample in one country, which limits how far the findings generalize to other cultures and life situations
• The study is cross-sectional, so it cannot speak to whether flourishing scores predict future health, retention, or life outcomes over time
• Working adults at a large employer are not representative of the unemployed, the retired, students, or people outside the formal workforce, where financial security operates differently

How Reborn Helps

Reborn's Harvard Flourishing Index uses the validated 12-item Secure Flourish Index so your six-domain profile rests on the same psychometric work tested here.