Self-assessed importance of domains of flourishing: Demographics and correlations with well-being

ABSTRACT

Research on flourishing has advanced despite limited knowledge about the extent to which flourishing domains are actually valued. This paper examines support for six flourishing domains – emotional health, physical health, purpose, character strengths, social connectedness, and financial security. A survey of 2,370 randomly sampled employees of a large, national, self-insured employer, demonstrated that these domains are nearly universally valued. A two-factor model, which fit the data best, suggested the presence of two distinct dimensions of material and psychosocial well-being importance. Women and men ranked the six domains in the same order, though women ranked each more highly than men. Having a daily spiritual practice was the strongest predictor of importance for all domains but financial security. The importance of the domains of well-being was associated with the self-reported experience of the domains of well-being. The importance of character strengths had the highest correlations with the experience of all domains.

KEYWORDS:

• Flourishing
• well-being
• demographics
• spirituality
• gender
• survey research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

The authors thank the John Templeton Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Aetna, a CVS Health business, and anonymous donors to the Sustainability and Health Initiative for NetPositive Enterprise for grants and financial support in carrying out this research. The research findings represent the perspective of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of any organization.