A longitudinal outcome-wide assessment of the association of life balance with flourishing: a 2-year cross-national analysis of 22 countries in the global flourishing study

Abstract Despite increasing interest in the idea of life balance, to date there appear to be no longitudinal studies examining this important aspect of human flourishing. Addressing this oversight, the current paper presents a foundational mapping study analyzing a life balance item (“In general, how often are the various aspects of your life in balance?”) in the Global Flourishing Study (GFS), a panel study investigating an extensive range of predictors and outcomes of flourishing in 22 diverse countries. We explore the association of balance at Wave 1 (207,919 participants) with 55 other flourishing-related outcomes at Wave 2 (128,868, a retention rate of 62%). For each outcome we conducted a multivariate regression analysis within each country (with random-effects meta-analyses then used to pool estimates across countries), regressing each Wave 2 outcome on Wave 1 balance, using two models, which could be understood as demarcating the plausible upper and lower bounds of the effect respectively: model 1 is less conservative, controlling for demographic and childhood variables only, whereas model 2 controls for seven principal components extracted from all contemporaneous Wave 1 variables. Even under the more conservative model 2 (the “lower bound”), which risks controlling for too much, balance had a small but significant association with many aspects of flourishing, including an effect size of 0.04 with a six-domain flourishing index at the heart of the GFS (which situates balance at joint 25th when considered relative to all 68 wave 1 exposures in a predictor-wide perspective, even if methodological caution means we cannot interpret this as a substantive hierarchy). In addition to its longitudinal nature, another strength of the GFS is its multi-national design, which revealed considerable variation in effect sizes, which for the flourishing index ranged from 0.11 in Hong Kong and Japan to -0.03 inmainland China. Thus, while balance seems important for flourishing, this effect is unevenly distributed, both across outcomes and countries, though more research is required to delve into why.