OUR CURRENT PROJECTS

YOUTH FLOURISHING IN THE ALL OUR FAMILIES COHORT STUDY

UNDERSTANDING FLOURISHING AND WELL-BEING IN CHILDREN/ADOLESCENTS AND IN ADULTS

We are currently conducting a mixed-methods project in the All Our Families study, a birth cohort study of over 3200 mothers and children in Calgary, to evalute youth flourishing and its associated longitudinal and cross-sectional risk and promotive factors. Flourishing can be defined as “the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of a person's life are good including the contexts in which that person lives” (source), however, inquiry into flourishing among developing populations is limited. Through qualitative interviews with AOF youth, coupled with rigourous quantitative analyses using AOF data, our group hopes to better understand how youth conceptualize flourishing, whether or not they are flourishing, and what factors influence their flourishing (from early childhood to present). This work was previously funded by Dr. Clayborne’s CIHR Fellowship (2023-24) and is currently funded through a VPR Catalyst Grant from the University of Calgary, and a Catalyst Grant from the Owerko Centre at the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute.

Our team is currently working on two large scoping reviews evaluating how flourishing and general well-being are defined and/or measured in children/adolescents and adults, respectively. This has involved the screening of over 37,000 titles and abstracts and over 1,500 full text articles from research published in the last 25 years. Both flourishing and holistic well-being have been defined and measured in several different ways in the recent literature, with little consensus, theoretical underpinnings, or consideration of the breadth of definitions that exist across disciplines. This work will provide an important summary of the major ways in which flourishing, general well-being, and related concepts (such as thriving, quality of life, positive mental health) are conceptualized. This work will also serve as an important foundation of our group’s research program in the coming years, as we seek to better understand how flourishing develops, what promotes and detracts from achieving flourishing, and what flourishing looks like across the life course.

Protocols for the adult and child reviews can be found on the Open Science Framework - see here (adult review), and here (child review).