How Do Young People See Their Lives?
(ANALYSIS) One of the most interesting lines of survey research in the last couple of years has been led by Tyler VanderWeele at Harvard. It’s focused on a fairly simple but incredibly consequential aspect of life — human flourishing.
VanderWeele has proposed five different dimensions of this concept: happiness and life satisfaction, physical and mental health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and close social relationships. What intrigues me about this work is that its focus is not just economic success or physical health - it goes beyond those things. Character matters here. So does leading a life that has some type of larger meaning.
To put it bluntly, Vanderwheele doesn’t leave out the idea of a spiritual and/or religious dimension when it comes to living a good life. And what’s even more tantalizing for someone like me is that lots of other agencies and survey firms have adopted a lot of the human flourishing questions and incorporated them into their own work.
For instance, the Global Flourishing Study interviewed over 200,000 respondents across 20+ countries and territories asking them questions from the Flourishing battery. Now we can assess if some cultures tend to do better on these metrics than others and try to figure out what generates these disparities.
In addition to the Global Flourishing Study, there are groups in the United States that are including Flourishing questions. For instance, the Association of Religion Data Archives just added a survey that was administered by the Springtide Research Institute that polled young people aged 13-25 years old.
That’s an incredibly valuable piece of data because it’s methodologically very difficult to ask questions of respondents who are under the age of 18. This means we can really trace human flourishing from kids who are in middle school all the way through to adults in their mid-twenties.
I think we can all admit that those years can be chaotic, turbulent, joyous, and often soul crushing.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post, visit his Substack page.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.