For years, the Global Flourishing Study has been building something unprecedented: a longitudinal portrait of what it looks like when human beings thrive, and what happens when they don’t. Today, a major piece of that portrait is available to anyone who wants to see it.

Waves 1 and 2 of the GFS dataset are now publicly available through the Center for Open Science (OSF), free of charge and without pre-registration. Researchers, journalists, educators, policymakers, and curious citizens alike can access the data immediately.

This is not a summary report. This is the dataset itself: approximately 200,000 participants across 22 countries and one territory, surveyed across six domains of flourishing, with the longitudinal structure that makes it possible to begin asking why and how, not just what.

Why Open Access Matters

Most large-scale studies of well-being remain locked behind institutional walls or gated by lengthy approval processes. The decision to release Waves 1 and 2 openly reflects a core conviction of the GFS: that flourishing is too important to study behind closed doors.

“We built this study because we believed the world needed a rigorous, shared language for what makes life go well,” said Dr. Byron Johnson, Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University and co-director of the GFS. “Today we’re putting the evidence in everyone’s hands.”

The release marks a milestone for a study that has already generated more than 90 peer-reviewed publications, including a special collection in Nature.

What Researchers Have Already Found

The data that becomes publicly available today has already begun reshaping conversations about well-being around the world. A few of the headline findings:

• Young people are struggling. Across countries, younger adults now report lower well-being than older populations. In many nations, the 18-to-24 age group reported the lowest flourishing scores. The pattern is striking enough to demand further investigation, and this open dataset gives researchers everywhere the tools to pursue it.
• The development paradox. One of the study’s most provocative findings is a negative relationship between a nation’s wealth and its citizens’ reported sense of meaning and purpose. Economic progress, it turns out, does not automatically translate into lives that feel meaningful. The tension at the heart of that finding is exactly the kind of question the GFS was designed to explore
• Faith communities and flourishing. Across diverse cultures, religious participation emerged as one of the strongest predictors of overall well-being. The finding held even in highly secular societies, suggesting that faith communities cultivate something essential to human thriving that warrants serious attention from researchers and policymakers alike.

How to Access the Data

Waves 1 and 2 data, along with accompanying instructions and documentation from Gallup, are available now. The dataset is open for general use. A small number of sensitive variables continue to require Institutional Review Board approval.

Researchers who want access to Wave 3, the study’s most recent data collection, can obtain it by pre-registering their study and analysis plans through the Global Flourishing Registry.

What Comes Next

The question the GFS set out to answer was whether flourishing could be measured rigorously across cultures. More than 90 publications later, that question has been answered.

“The question is no longer whether flourishing can be measured,” said Dr. Tyler VanderWeele of Harvard University and co-director of the GFS. “It’s what we do with what we’ve found.”

A fourth wave of data collection is now in preparation. But the most important work may be what happens next with the data that is already here, now in the hands of anyone willing to look.

The Global Flourishing Study is housed at Baylor University’s Institute for Global Human Flourishing, in collaboration with Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Program and Gallup. Launched in 2018, the study is a multi-wave, longitudinal investigation of human flourishing across 22 countries and one territory.