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Pioneering global study measures happiness holistically in 22 countries, including Spain

The Global Flourishing Study, in which the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra collaborates, proposes a new way of understanding human well-being.


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/Pedro de la Rosa, researcher at the Institute for Culture and Society.

26 | 08 | 2025

Can happiness be measured by income or life expectancy alone? An international network of researchers seeks to expand the programs of study on happiness to reach new results that address this issue in a rigorous and holistic way. With that goal in mind, they have launched the Global Flourishing Study (GFS), a research project that seeks to understand what makes a person flourish and how that varies by country, culture, staff history or economic circumstances. The study, which has completed its first year of work, is scheduled to continue for another four years. Each advance of the research is published in Nature, one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals. Pedro de la Rosa, researcher at the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra, leads the project 's analysis of alcohol and tobacco consumption as lifestyle indicators and their relationship with well-being.

Coordinated by Harvard University, Baylor University, Open Science Framework and the Gallup polling business , the research measures human well-being - or "flourishing" - holistically: physical and mental health, meaning and purpose in life, moral character and virtue, personal relationships, happiness and life satisfaction, and material and financial stability. More than 200,000 people were interviewed in 22 countries to obtain a representative sample of the reality of societies in each territory.

One of the main methodological innovations of the GFS is that all the published programs of study are carried out with the same statistical models, which allows perfect comparability between countries and between the topics analyzed. This unified approach is unprecedented in the social sciences and has been possible thanks to a great coordination effort. As Pedro de la Rosa points out, "each study should not be viewed separately, but as one more element in an ecosystem of publications. The amount of information obtained simultaneously is impressive".

Among the first findings, Spain sample clear strengths in dimensions such as social relationships, life balance, perceived autonomy and leave perceived discrimination. However, it appears at the bottom in financial well-being, inner peace and the ability to be heard and taken into account in the political sphere, which deepens the discussion about the country's social and economic challenges. Another of the most striking facts is that the emotional impact of losing a parent in childhood is especially high in Spain. This reality manifests the importance of family ties in the development long-term well-being.

Pedro de la Rosa explains the scope of the project: "The value of the study lies in its design: all the articles published in Nature follow the same methods, which allows a rigorous comparison between countries and subjects studied. To our knowledge, this is the first time that so many programs of study have been coordinated in the social sciences in order to increase the transparency, speed and comparability of the scientific process. In addition to offering simplified rankings, the Global Flourishing Study offers a global view of well-being, with data that is comparable across countries and useful for designing evidence-based public, educational and health policies," adds De la Rosa.

One of the core topic novelties of the GFS is its longitudinal dimension: data will be collected in successive waves for at least five years, allowing not only to describe but also to predict how individual well-being evolves over time. Moreover, all the material data data, codes and publications - will be open access, which reinforces the project 's commitment to scientific transparency. In this first phase, the project has already yielded significant results, such as that good family relationships and attendance at religious ceremonies are associated with higher levels of flourishing across the board in the countries studied.

All results, including codes and data instructions , will be openly available to researchers and the general public. Among the 22 countries studied there is representation from the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania. Among them, Argentina, Brazil, United States, Mexico, Sweden, Poland, United Kingdom, Turkey, Japan, Philippines, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and Australia.

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