Studying Aspects of Flourishing Among Adolescents

The Flourishing Children Project responds to a call for rigorous indicators of positive development in adolescents by creating scales for 19 constructs of positive development in the categories of flourishing in school and work, personal flourishing, flourishing in relationships, relationship skills, helping others to flourish, and environmental stewardship. Each scale can be used alone or in combination to fill gaps in available measures of important constructs of adolescent flourishing. This chapter presents background and overview of the project. Our work is based on a framework for generating positive indicators that we developed previously. The current project began with a review of the research and extant measures for the constructs. With that information, we created definitions for each of the 19 constructs that represented a consensus from the literature. We then selected existing items that measure these constructs or adapted or created new items, which we tested through three rounds of cognitive interviews. To ensure that they were suited for national surveys, the scales were tested on a nationally representative sample of adolescents and parents. Finally, we conducted psychometric analyses to ensure the scales possessed desired psychometric properties.