A brief measure of complete subjective well-being in Germany: A population-based validation of a German version of the Flourish Index (FI) and the Secure Flourish Index (SFI)

Sebastian Sattler; Renae Wilkinson; Matthew T Lee

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0284892

A brief measure of complete subjective well-being in Germany: A population-based validation of a German version of the Flourish Index (FI) and the Secure Flourish Index (SFI)

PLoS One. 2023 Nov 28;18(11):e0284892. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0284892. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Sebastian Sattler^{1

2

3}, Renae Wilkinson⁴, Matthew T Lee^{4

5}

Affiliations

¹ Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany.
² Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany.
³ Pragmatic Health Ethics Research Unit, Institut de Recherches Cliniques de Montréal, Quebec, Canada.
⁴ Human Flourishing Program, Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, CA, United States of America.
⁵ Institute for Studies of Religion, Baylor University, Waco, TX, United States of America.

Abstract

Measuring subjective well-being in a multidimensional, valid, reliable, and parsimonious way is important for both social science research and social policy. Here, we present an efficient measure of distinct domains of subjective well-being and overall flourishing. The Flourishing Index (FI) consists of five sub-domains: 1. happiness and life satisfaction, 2. physical and mental health, 3. meaning and purpose, 4. character and virtue, and 5. close social relationships. The Secure Flourishing Index (SFI) adds the sub-domain financial and material stability, which is thought to be necessary to sustain the other domains over time. We developed a German version of these measures in a multi-stage translation and scale testing process. The results of an exploratory factor analysis in Study 1 (N = 192) suggest a unidimensional structure of the FI and a two-dimensional structure of the SFI. Moreover, both indices (and most sub-domains) revealed acceptable to good reliability. The factor structures were confirmed in Study 2 (N = 13,268). We provide indications for measurement invariance of both indices with regard to gender and age. We furthermore examined inter-correlations with related constructs such as importance of health, self-efficacy, and social support. Study 3 (N = 317) finds evidence for high convergent validity of both the FI and the SFI with overall well-being as well as sub-scores of the PERMA-Profiler. These results suggest that the FI and the SFI are efficient measures of distinct domains of subjective well-being and overall flourishing. Our translation of the FI and SFI, along with the empirical relationships that we found among the measures that we reviewed, will help scholars in Germany (and beyond) explore an expanded range of domains of well-being, including the comparatively neglected domains of character and virtue, physical health, and financial and material stability.

Copyright: © 2023 Sattler et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Publication types

Review

MeSH terms

Germany
Mental Health*
Physical Examination*
Psychometrics
Reproducibility of Results
Social Sciences
Surveys and Questionnaires

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation [grant number: SA 2992/2-1; to S.S.]. Additional support was provided by the John Templeton Foundation [grant number: 62022; to M.T.L.], the Kern Family Foundation [grant number: 2019-01467; to M.T.L. and R.W.], the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation [grant number: 74275; to M.T.L.], and Aetna, Inc [grant number: A33796; to M.T.L.]. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.