By Emily Schoch | Staff Writer
Baylor is making history with the Global Flourishing Study, the largest funded research project in the school’s history, which aims to explore human well-being across different cultures and faiths.
Backed by a $43.4 million grant and conducted in collaboration with top institutions like Harvard and Gallup, the decade-long study seeks to understand what it means to thrive — both personally and collectively — on a global scale. With its far-reaching impact, the study cements Baylor’s role as a leader in faith-based research while shaping conversations on human flourishing for years to come.
Provost Nancy Brickhouse explained how Baylor is conducting the research for the Global Flourishing Study.
“The Global Flourishing Study is a survey-based research project that includes 22 different countries from across the globe to ask them a range of questions around issues of health and finance and spirituality and social communities to better understand the kind of social determinants, if you will, of human flourishing,” Brickhouse said.
Brickhouse said Baylor is “cognizant” of how the scientific research is affecting its candidates who are being interviewed to gather data.
Dr. Byron Johnson, director of the Institute for Studies of Religion, is the Global Flourishing Study co-director alongside Dr. Tyler VanderWeele, John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology at Harvard University. Johnson said in an interview with The Trinity Forum that the reason why Baylor is passionate about conducting this research is to improve human satisfaction in life.
“Let me just start out by saying one of the reasons why we’re doing this is to learn what flourishing is,” Johnson said. “We haven’t figured that out. We don’t have all those questions answered. We have some ideas about what we think flourishing looks like, especially in the West. And Tyler VanderWeele has helped coined this definition that if you’re doing well in all aspects of life, you could say that that person is flourishing.”
Johnson said a key point of research during these studies is to understand why various populations of people are happier than others and what circumstantially is providing long-term happiness to societies who experience personal flourishing. The research is geared towards gathering accurate data from humans all over the globe by conducting a series of short interviews to get a realistic grasp on what in their day-to-day lives generates happiness.
“We’re not doing hour-long interviews with people,” Johnson said. “We don’t have the time because we’re tracking well over 200,000 people around the world. So our interviews are only 22 minutes.”
Brickhouse said Baylor’s mission is to have a more “holistic” view and understanding of human beings.
“The purpose of the study is to better understand the conditions under which human beings thrive and flourish and derive how they have lives of meaning with important relationships,” Brickhouse said. “It’s a very holistic view of understanding human beings and their fullness, including the importance of spirituality, the importance of faith communities.”
Once all of the data is collected from the interviews, the information and results from these studies will become public within scientific journals.
“The data that is being collected is open source data that is available for anyone to use,” Brickhouse said. “There’s a lot of transparency about what the data actually says, and that is really important from a scientific point of view because it means other people can check your work. It’s not a ‘just trust me’ kind of study. This is the evidence that we’re using to draw our conclusions and we welcome you to also scrutinize the evidence and see if you come to the same conclusions.”
Brickhouse said Baylor is the perfect candidate to host this type of research because of the intentional care the university offers its students and faculty.
“I think it’s one of the things that makes particular sense … for Baylor to be engaged in because of the way in which it views humans and the fullness of what human beings are and not treating humans in a way that is overly reductive,” Brickhouse said.
