Abstract
Psychology and related fields have historically been Western-centric, influenced especially by the ideas and values of the United States. Consequently, aspects of life that have been relatively neglected in Western cultures have been similarly overlooked in the literature. This includes balance in life (notwithstanding select instances of interest, like work-life balance). However, amidst a broader movement to redress the Western-centricity of academia is an emergent scholarship on this topic. This paper contributes to this by presenting the most ambitious longitudinal study to date of balance, namely as an item – “In general, how often are the various aspects of your life in balance?” – in the Global Flourishing Study, a five-year (minimum) study investigating the predictors of human flourishing involving (in this first year) 202,898 participants from 22 countries. Specifically, this paper looks at the childhood predictors of balance, using random effects meta-analysis to aggregate all findings in the main text, focusing on three research questions. First, how do different aspects of a child's upbringing predict balance in adulthood, for which the most impactful factor was “Feeling like an outsider growing up” (RR = 0.90; 95% CI [0.87,0.92]), and the least was immigration status (RR = 0.98; 95% CI [0.97, 1.00]). Second, do these associations vary by country, with the effect of being an outsider, for example, being strongest in Australia, and weakest (not different than zero) in Türkiye, South Africa, Nigeria, Poland, Egypt, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Third, are the observed relationships robust to potential unmeasured confounding, as assessed by E-values, which on the whole was the case. These results shed new light on the cross-cultural and causal dynamics of this overlooked topic, and provide the foundation for further enquiry.