Flourishing in South Africa: Benchmarks and sociodemographic variation across 69 health, wellbeing, and related factors in the Global Flourishing Study

Abstract

Using nationally representative data for South Africa (N = 2,651) from Wave 1 of the Global Flourishing Study, we explored the distributions of 69 health, wellbeing, and related factors and tested for potential sociodemographic differences in the means/proportions of those indicators. When comparing estimates for South Africa with pooled estimates for the combined set of 22 countries included in the Global Flourishing Study, we did not find definitive evidence of differences on most of the main health and wellbeing outcomes. On the few main outcomes where we observed differences, estimates for some were more favorable in South Africa (e.g., peace, suffering) while others were less favorable (e.g., life satisfaction, trust). South Africa was more distinguishable from the entire set of 22 countries on the outcomes within the supplementary domains of socioeconomic factors and religion/spirituality, with lower estimates found for South Africa on several socioeconomic factors and higher estimates observed for almost all religion/spirituality indicators. Our exploration of sociodemographic variation in the outcomes suggested that some subpopulations might be flourishing to a greater degree than others (e.g., those aged 80 years or older, males), but the pattern of sociodemographic differences across the outcomes was somewhat mixed and the flourishing profile of subpopulations varied quite considerably. These findings offer important insights for South African policymakers and public health practitioners on the need to support vulnerable subpopulations (e.g., females, those who are divorced), as well as lay the foundation for population-level monitoring of flourishing in South Africa using future Global Flourishing Study panel data.