The design and analysis architecture of the Global Flourishing Study: Advancing knowledge through coordinated research reports

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the design, analysis, and planning of the Global Flourishing Study (GFS) and its accompanying research papers. We discuss various influences on the planning and design of the study, including multi-purpose epidemiologic cohort studies, outcome-wide analysis templates, and multidimensional notions of flourishing. We provide an overview of the coordinated analytic strategies of several series of GFS research papers, the common methodologic approaches and shared methods review of these series of research reports, and their relations to the accompanying special collections in the Springer Nature journals and in the International Journal of Wellbeing that hosted many of these papers and publications. We respond to some recent critiques (Blanchflower, 2026) of the analytic and publication approaches that the core GFS research team has employed, and we discuss some of the limitations of, and future directions for, the GFS and the research that has emerged from it.