Tyler J Vanderweele
Biographic Data
| ID | 232444 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tyler J Vanderweele |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tyler J |
| FAMILY NAME | Vanderweele |
| SIGNATURE | VANDERWEELE T J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6112-0239 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 136 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 192 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 135 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
A comparative “report card” wellbeing assessment of 22 countries in the Global Flourishing Study
When evaluating how countries are faring, there is a widespread tendency to rely on single metrics or indices, whether objective (e.g., GDP) or subjective (e.g., life evaluation). However, flourishing is multidimensional, and societies invariably do better in some ways and less so in others (even if some places get more things “right” than others), so any comprehensive assessment must be multifaceted. We demonstrate this by evaluating 22 countrie…
Parental Religion and Spirituality in Early Childhood Development: An Exploratory Narrative Overview of Longitudinal Evidence
Where Hope Thrives: Demographic Variation in Hope across 22 Countries
202,898) and employing random effects meta-analysis, we explore the cross-national variations in self-rated hope across various sociodemographic factors, including age, gender, marital status, employment, religious service attendance, education, and immigration status. Our findings reveal considerable variations in levels of hope across countries, and some notable differences across demographic groups, highlighting unique individual and societal …
Adolescent screen use in the pre-internet era and subsequent health and well-being: An outcome-wide longitudinal study
This study used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health, N = 11,054) to assess whether increases in screen-based leisure during adolescence (Wave II, from 1996) predicted adult well-being (Wave IV, from 2008-09), adjusting for a wide range of covariates (Wave I, from 1995). Using an outcome-wide analytic approach, we examined associations between screen time and 38 adult outcomes, adjusting for prior sc…
Harmonic Principles of Wellbeing: Structural and Discriminant Validity of a Gallup World Poll Module Encompassing Life Balance, Harmony, Stability, and Peace
Causal estimates of multidimensional well-being under hypothetical forgiveness shift scenarios: Longitudinal evidence from a national panel in New Zealand
Forgiveness has been identified as a potential public health resource, but how might average well-being change if forgiveness were higher across the population? In this three-wave longitudinal study (Wave 1: 2018/2019 [T0], Wave 2: 2019/2020 [T1], Wave 3: 2020/2021 [T2]) with a nationally representative sample of New Zealanders ( N = 47928), we explore this question by investigating the potential causal effects of two hypothetical forgiveness shi…
Forgiveness as a potential public health resource: Reflections on complexities and possibilities in dialogue with Lemon (2026) and Tsai (2026)
In this commentary, we bring together an interdisciplinary group of voices to engage reflections by Lemon (2026) and Tsai (2026) on Cowden, Fung, et al.’s (2026) article estimating potential causal effects of hypothetical forgiveness shift scenarios on multidimensional well-being. We explore some of the conceptual, methodological, and practical tensions that arise when a psychosocial exposure (such as forgiveness) is viewed through a public healt…
Identifying predictors of housing distress in later life: A lagged exposure-wide approach in a national sample of older U.S. adults
Objectives Housing insecurity is increasingly prevalent among older adults in the US, yet the factors that contribute to housing-related distress in this population remain inadequately understood. This study examined how changes in a comprehensive set of physical health, health behaviors, psychosocial, and economic factors are associated with subsequent housing distress, and explored differences by military veteran status. Methods We analyzed thr…
Human Flourishing from a Complex Adaptive System Perspective: Exploring the Wellbeing of Social Groups as Emergent Entities
Can qualities of wellbeing and flourishing be meaningfully applied at the level of the social group, not merely as an aggregation of the wellbeing or flourishing of its members, but on its own terms as an emergent entity? This paper proposes that this is indeed the case, over three sections. First, we introduce the notions of wellbeing and flourishing, and note that these are usually applied to individual humans, not to groups (other than as the …
Mapping Religious and Spiritual Comfort Worldwide: Demographic Patterns Across 22 Countries
Prior research highlights the role of religious and spiritual (R/S) comfort in coping with adversity, particularly in Global North contexts. This study examined R/S comfort across 22 countries and various demographics, using representative data from 202,898 individuals participating in the Global Flourishing Study. For each demographic category country-specific proportions of R/S comfort were estimated by country and then pooled using random-effe…
Adolescence in social context: Longitudinal associations of 15 social factors with health and well-being
Religious Reading across Borders and Demographics: A Study of 22 Countries
Previous research on religiosity mainly focuses on religious service attendance and prayer. Less is known about reading and listening to sacred texts (RLST) across cultures. This study examines RLST habits across 22 countries and key demographic groups, using data from 202,898 individuals. The country-specific results are pooled using a random-effects meta-analysis. The prevalence of RLST varied substantially, from 4% in Japan to 70% in Tanzania,…
Associations of Childhood Experiences With Adulthood Religious and Relational Outcomes Among Protestants and Catholics in the United States
In a United States sample of 32 Protestant and Catholic congregations ( N = 16,548), we evaluated associations between seven childhood religious and family experiences (e.g., conversations with parents about faith, childhood religious service attendance [RSA]) and five religious and relational outcomes in adulthood (e.g., RSA, conversations with one's own children about faith). We used multilevel models that incorporated childhood predictors simu…
The Complex Relationship between Inner and Outer Peace: New Global Insights from the Gallup World Poll
Swedish Well-Being: The Rising Importance of Age Among Demographic, Personality, and Social Relationship Factors
The main demographic and psychological correlates of Well-Being (WB) are well-established, but have not yet been assessed in the Swedish population–regularly ranked among the world’s top five ranked WB nations–based on large, nationally representative data. Using 2023 Global Flourishing Study data ( N = 15,068), this paper analyzes Swedish WB across three domains: demography (e.g., gender, age, and income), individual personality traits (e.g., Bi…
Housing distress and subsequent health and well-being among older adults: An outcome-wide longitudinal approach
Housing insecurity is increasing among older adults in the U.S., yet the impact of housing-related distress on health and well-being in this population is understudied. This study uses three waves of prospective data from a national sample of U.S. adults aged 50+ years (Health and Retirement Study, N = 12,998) to examine associations between housing distress and 35 indicators of physical, behavioral, and psychosocial health and well-being four ye…
Towards a Data-Driven and Globally-Informed Framework of Flourishing: A Seven-Factor Model Derived from Factor-Analysis of 38 Indicators in the Gallup World Poll
Intellectual and Viewpoint Diversity: Importance, Scope and Bounds
In recent decades, the ideological diversity of faculties in the United States has declined considerably, and this has arguably had implications for a number of other aspects of academic life. Efforts to promote intellectual and viewpoint diversity are, however, often met with skepticism, and also with reasonable concerns over threats to the autonomy and integrity of academic disciplines and institutions. Clarifying the role, scope, and bounds of…
Demographic Variation in Inner Peace Across 22 Countries: A Cross-National Analysis of the Global Flourishing Study
Although peace is invariably regarded as a universal good, most research focuses on ‘outer’ forms (e.g., societal relations), with little attention to ‘inner’ peace (IP, i.e., tranquil states of mind). This may reflect the Western-centrism of academia, with low arousal positive states like IP being relatively undervalued in the West. But alongside broader efforts to redress such Western-centricity, an emergent literature is now exploring this con…
Measuring wellbeing in the Global Flourishing Study: Insights from a cross-national analysis of cognitive interviews from 22 countries
Prior research suggests that cross-national cognitive interviewing can provide preliminarily insights into the extent to which survey items that will be employed in large-scale global research might be understood similarly or differently across countries. Against the backdrop of the recently launched Global Flourishing Study, we used multinational cognitive interview data from 116 individuals ( M = 41.4 years, SD = 14.9, female = 50.9%) in 22 cou…
Longitudinal associations of spousal support and strain with health and well‐being: An outcome‐wide study of married older U.S. Adults
In the present study, we examined the prospective associations of both spousal support and spousal strain with a wide range of health and well‐being outcomes in married older adults. Applying the analytic template for outcome‐wide designs, three waves of longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study ( n = 7788, M age = 64.2 years) were analyzed using linear regression, logistic regression, and generalized linear models. A set of models w…
Religion and Mental Health: Is the Relationship Causal
Evidence is presented that the protective relationships between religious participation and depression, suicide, and substance use are in fact causal. Such evidence comes from rigorous longitudinal studies with large sample size and control for confounding and baseline outcomes; from meta-analyses and systematic reviews of such studies; from robustness of associations to potential unmeasured confounding; and from quasi-experimental designs in the…
Comparison of the effects of childhood demographic characteristics on physical activity during adulthood across 22 countries
The findings highlight the critical role of childhood self-rated health and religious involvement in shaping physical activity habits in adulthood across 22 countries. These results lay the groundwork for future GFS data (2024 through 2027) to guide interventions promoting physical activity among adults globally
Comparison of the relationship between key demographic features and physical activity levels across 22 countries
These results contribute to a deeper understanding of the sociodemographic disparities in physical activity participation. By documenting physical activity patterns across key demographic groups and countries worldwide, this study provides valuable insights into the social determinants of physical activity behavior
Strangers, Friends, and Everything Between: Sociodemographic Variation in Social Relationship Quality Across 22 Countries
While prior research has demonstrated that social relationships meaningfully shape health and well-being, less is known about how subjective evaluations of the quality of one’s relationships differ across national contexts and across sociodemographic groups within different countries. Using data from the Global Flourishing Study, a large international sample of 202,898 adults from 22 countries, we examined the average level and distributions of s…
Sensitivity Analysis for Contagion Effects in Social Networks
Analyses of social network data have suggested that obesity, smoking, happiness, and loneliness all travel through social networks. Individuals exert ''contagion effects'' on one another through social ties and association. These analyses have come under critique because of the possibility that homophily from unmeasured factors may explain these statistical associations and because similar findings can be obtained when the same methodology is app…
Empirical Research on Factors Related to the Subjective Well-Being of Chinese Urban Residents
Perceived neighborhood social cohesion and subsequent health and well-being in older adults: An outcome-wide longitudinal approach
Intersectional decomposition analysis with differential exposure, effects, and construct
The role of financial conditions for physical and mental health. Evidence from a longitudinal survey and insurance claims data
Policy-makers might consider the introduction of more effective measures for ensuring favorable financial conditions as an important contributor to better population health. Furthermore, policy could encourage teaching adequate financial management techniques and the importance of understanding of long-term consequences of financial decisions, as those might be pivotal for health outcomes
Positive parenting improves multiple aspects of health and well-being in young adulthood
Parental warmth and flourishing in mid-life
Accurate Statistics on Covid-19 Are Essential for Policy Guidance and Decisions
Disease surveillance forms the basis for response to epidemics. COVID-19 provides a modern example of why the classic mantra of “person, place, and time” remains crucial: epidemic control requires
Why and When "Flawed" Social Network Analyses Still Yield Valid Tests of no Contagion
Lyons (2011) offered several critiques of the social network analyses of Christakis and Fowler, including issues of confounding, model inconsistency, and statistical dependence in networks. Here we show that in some settings, social network analyses of the type employed by Christakis and Fowler will still yield valid tests of the null of no social contagion, even though estimates and confidence intervals may not be valid. In particular, we show t…
Religion and Spirituality among American Indian, South Asian, Black, Hispanic/Latina, and White Women in the Study on Stress, Spirituality, and Health
Social scientists have increasingly recognized the lack of diversity in survey research on American religion, resulting in a dearth of data on religion and spirituality (R/S) in understudied racial and ethnic groups. At the same time, epidemiological studies have increasingly diversified their racial and ethnic representation, but have collected few R/S measures to date. With a particular focus on American Indian and South Asian women (in additio…
Effects of Religious Service Attendance and Religious Importance on Depression: Examining the Meta-analytic Evidence
Garssen et al. provide meta-analytic evidence, from longitudinal studies with control for baseline outcomes, for protective associations of religious service attendance and religious importance with subsequent depression. The present commentary considers whether or not these associations might be causal, and what the practical relevance of these associations might be. Further discussion is given to the methodological considerations that are impor…
Partnerships Between Public Health Agencies and Faith Communities
Multidimensional versus unidimensional approaches to well-being
The proper scope of education for flourishing
The concept of flourishing has recently come into vogue within various areas of the humanities and social sciences (e.g. philosophy, psychology, economics, health, education). This article focuses on its potential role within education, where the retrieval of flourishing has perhaps been most visible of all the recent areas of interest, setting in motion what some have called a ‘flourishing bandwagon’. This bandwagon has blazed a trail for the so…
Social support and social strain from children and subsequent health and well-being among older U.S. adults
Social relationships contribute to well-being across the life course and may be especially vital resources for supporting healthy aging among older adults. This research examined associations between perceptions of social support and social strain from children assessed by older adult parents and 35 indicators of physical, behavioral, and psychosocial health and well-being. We utilized three waves of data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS…
Eliminating racial disparities in dementia risk by equalizing education quality: A sensitivity analysis
Boundary Crossing: Meaningfully Engaging Religious Traditions and Religious Institutions in Public Health
Interest in religion and spirituality continues to grow among public health practitioners, researchers, and scholars. While there have been several recent landmark publications and efforts to understand the intersections of religion, spirituality, and public health, work remains to be done. In this commentary, we outline three challenges that impede more substantive engagement with religion and spirituality from the public health perspective; nam…
Evaluating Public Health Interventions: 6. Modeling Ratios or Differences? Let the Data Tell Us
We provide an overview of the relative merits of ratio measures (relative risks, risk ratios, and rate ratios) compared with difference measures (risk and rate differences). We discuss evidence that the multiplicative model often fits the data well, so that rarely are interactions with other risk factors for the outcome observed when one uses a logistic, relative risk, or Cox regression model to estimate the intervention effect. As a consequence,…
A Course on Religion and Public Health at Harvard
AffiliationsTyler J. VanderWeele is with the Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA. Harold G. Koenig is with the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Duke University, Durham, NC
Rising preterm birth rates, 1989-2004: Changing demographics or changing obstetric practice
Direct and Indirect Effects for Neighborhood-Based Clustered and Longitudinal Data
Definitions of direct and indirect effects are given for settings in which individuals are clustered in groups or neighborhoods and in which treatments are administered at the group level. A particular intervention may affect individual outcomes both through its effect on the individual and by changing the group or neighborhood itself. Identification conditions are given for controlled direct effects and for natural direct and indirect effects. T…
Associations of orientation to promote good in challenging situations with distress and well‐being: Multi‐study evidence from three non‐Western Longitudinal samples
We examine whether an orientation to promote good serves as a potential buffer against distress and facilitator of well‐being outcomes in three non‐Western samples with a recent history of conflict (Indonesia, Colombia, Mexico) and across three different time frames (1, 4 and 12 months). Longitudinal surveys provided data for cross‐lagged panel modelling. A series of sensitivity analyses provided evidence for the robustness of results. Persons wi…
Aristotelian Flourishing and Contemporary Philosophical Theories of Wellbeing
Several philosophical theories of wellbeing claim Aristotelian ancestry and employ an Aristotelian construct of flourishing. Yet it is not clear how we should interpret Aristotle’s notion of flourishing or eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία). In this article, we offer an analysis of Aristotle’s notion of eudaimonia and consider to what extent it can be categorized within the framework of contemporary philosophical theories of wellbeing. We stress the active …
Hope in adolescence and subsequent health and well-being in adulthood: An outcome-wide longitudinal study
Toward an Expanded Taxonomy of Happiness: A Conceptual Analysis of 16 Distinct Forms of Mental Wellbeing
Recent decades have seen a surge of scientific interest in happiness. However, its theoretical conceptualization is a work in progress. Much of the literature focuses on two main forms: hedonic (encompassing life satisfaction and positive affect) and eudaimonic (encompassing phenomena such as character development and meaning in life). However, this binary has been critiqued as being incomplete, in part because it reflects a Western-centric persp…
Conceptual issues concerning mediation, interventions and composition
Concepts concerning mediation in the causal inference literature are reviewed. Notions of direct and indirect effects from a counterfactual approach to mediation are compared with those arising from the standard regression approach to mediation of It is shown that concepts of direct and indirect effect from causal inference generalize those described by Baron and Kenny and that under appropriate identification assumptions these more general direc…
Marginal Structural Models for the Estimation of Direct and Indirect Effects
The estimation of controlled direct effects can be carried out by fitting a marginal structural model and using inverse probability of treatment weighting. To use marginal structural models to estimate natural direct and indirect effects, 2 marginal structural models can be used: 1 for the effects of the treatment and mediator on the outcome and 1 for the effect of the treatment on the mediator. Unlike marginal structural models typically used in…
Effect of a Housing and Case Management Program on Emergency Department Visits and Hospitalizations Among Chronically Ill Homeless Adults: A Randomized Trial
CONTEXT: Homeless adults, especially those with chronic medical illnesses, are frequent users of costly medical services, especially emergency department and hospital services. OBJECTIVE: To assess the effectiveness of a case management and housing program in reducing use of urgent medical services among homeless adults with chronic medical illnesses. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: Randomized controlled trial conducted at a public teaching ho…
Trends in Prenatal Ultrasound Use in the United States: 1995 To 2006
BACKGROUND: While controversy continues about the appropriateness of routine ultrasound screening, there are little data on actual clinical practices or trends in the United States. OBJECTIVES: To examine changes in prenatal ultrasound utilization over time and determine whether ultrasound utilization is associated with maternal age, race/ethnicity, payer status, region of the country, or pregnancy risk group. RESEARCH DESIGN: Data on prenatal vi…
Odds Ratios for Mediation Analysis for a Dichotomous Outcome
For dichotomous outcomes, the authors discuss when the standard approaches to mediation analysis used in epidemiology and the social sciences are valid, and they provide alternative mediation analysis techniques when the standard approaches will not work. They extend definitions of controlled direct effects and natural direct and indirect effects from the risk difference scale to the odds ratio scale. A simple technique to estimate direct and ind…
Screening Tests during Prenatal Care: Does Practice Follow the Evidence
Direct and Indirect Effects for Neighborhood-Based Clustered and Longitudinal Data
Definitions of direct and indirect effects are given for settings in which individuals are clustered in groups or neighborhoods and in which treatments are administered at the group level. A particular intervention may affect individual outcomes both through its effect on the individual and by changing the group or neighborhood itself. Identification conditions are given for controlled direct effects and for natural direct and indirect effects. T…
Estimating measures of interaction on an additive scale for preventive exposures
Measures of interaction on an additive scale (relative excess risk due to interaction [RERI], attributable proportion [AP], synergy index [S]), were developed for risk factors rather than preventive factors. It has been suggested that preventive factors should be recoded to risk factors before calculating these measures. We aimed to show that these measures are problematic with preventive factors prior to recoding, and to clarify the recoding met…
Sensitivity Analysis for Contagion Effects in Social Networks
Analyses of social network data have suggested that obesity, smoking, happiness, and loneliness all travel through social networks. Individuals exert ''contagion effects'' on one another through social ties and association. These analyses have come under critique because of the possibility that homophily from unmeasured factors may explain these statistical associations and because similar findings can be obtained when the same methodology is app…
Empirical Research on Factors Related to the Subjective Well-Being of Chinese Urban Residents
On the Reciprocal Association Between Loneliness and Subjective Well-being
Loneliness has been shown to longitudinally predict subjective well-being. The authors used data from a longitudinal population-based study (2002-2006) of non-Hispanic white, African-American, and nonblack Latino-American persons born between 1935 and 1952 and living in Cook County, Illinois. They applied marginal structural models for time-varying exposures to examine the magnitude and persistence of the effects of loneliness on subjective well-…
Recommendations for presenting analyses of effect modification and interaction
Authors often do not give sufficient information to draw conclusions about the size and statistical significance of interaction on the additive and multiplicative scales. To improve this, we provide four steps, template tables and examples. We distinguish two cases: when the causal effect of intervening on one exposure, across strata of another factor, is of interest ('effect modification'); and when the causal effect of intervening on two exposu…
Why and When "Flawed" Social Network Analyses Still Yield Valid Tests of no Contagion
Lyons (2011) offered several critiques of the social network analyses of Christakis and Fowler, including issues of confounding, model inconsistency, and statistical dependence in networks. Here we show that in some settings, social network analyses of the type employed by Christakis and Fowler will still yield valid tests of the null of no social contagion, even though estimates and confidence intervals may not be valid. In particular, we show t…
Rising preterm birth rates, 1989-2004: Changing demographics or changing obstetric practice
Mediation analysis allowing for exposure–mediator interactions and causal interpretation: Theoretical assumptions and implementation with SAS and SPSS macros.
Mediation analysis is a useful and widely employed approach to studies in the field of psychology and in the social and biomedical sciences. The contributions of this article are several-fold. First we seek to bring the developments in mediation analysis for nonlinear models within the counterfactual framework to the psychology audience in an accessible format and compare the sorts of inferences about mediation that are possible in the presence o…
Social Networks and Causal Inference
Mendelian randomization in health research: Using appropriate genetic variants and avoiding biased estimates
Mendelian randomization methods, which use genetic variants as instrumental variables for exposures of interest to overcome problems of confounding and reverse causality, are becoming widespread for assessing causal relationships in epidemiological studies. The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how results can be biased if researchers select genetic variants on the basis of their association with the exposure in their own dataset, as o…
Mediation Analysis with Multiple Mediators
Recent advances in the causal inference literature on mediation have extended traditional approaches to direct and indirect effects to settings that allow for interactions and non-linearities. In this paper, these approaches from causal inference are further extended to settings in which multiple mediators may be of interest. Two analytic approaches, one based on regression and one based on weighting are proposed to estimate the effect mediated t…
A Unification of Mediation and Interaction: A 4-Way Decomposition
The overall effect of an exposure on an outcome, in the presence of a mediator with which the exposure may interact, can be decomposed into 4 components: (1) the effect of the exposure in the absence of the mediator, (2) the interactive effect when the mediator is left to what it would be in the absence of exposure, (3) a mediated interaction, and (4) a pure mediated effect. These 4 components, respectively, correspond to the portion of the effec…
A Tutorial on Interaction
In this tutorial, we provide a broad introduction to the topic of interaction between the effects of exposures. We discuss interaction on both additive and multiplicative scales using risks, and we discuss their relation to statistical models (e.g. linear, log-linear, and logistic models). We discuss and evaluate arguments that have been made for using additive or multiplicative scales to assess interaction. We further discuss approaches to prese…
On the Causal Interpretation of Race in Regressions Adjusting for Confounding and Mediating Variables
We consider several possible interpretations of the "effect of race" when regressions are run with race as an exposure variable, controlling also for various confounding and mediating variables. When adjustment is made for socioeconomic status early in a person's life, we discuss under what contexts the regression coefficients for race can be interpreted as corresponding to the extent to which a racial inequality would remain if various socioecon…
Mediation Analysis: A Practitioner's Guide
This article provides an overview of recent developments in mediation analysis, that is, analyses used to assess the relative magnitude of different pathways and mechanisms by which an exposure may affect an outcome. Traditional approaches to mediation in the biomedical and social sciences are described. Attention is given to the confounding assumptions required for a causal interpretation of direct and indirect effect estimates. Methods from the…
Causal inference and longitudinal data: A case study of religion and mental health
Religious Service Attendance and Lower Depression Among Women—a Prospective Cohort Study
OBJECTIVE: Previous studies on the association between religious service attendance and depression have been mostly cross-sectional, subject to reverse causation, and did not account for the potential feedback between religious service attendance and depression. We prospectively evaluated evidence whether religious service attendance decreased risk of subsequent risk of depression and whether depression increased subsequent cessation of service a…
Association of Religious Service Attendance With Mortality Among Women
IMPORTANCE: Studies on the association between attendance at religious services and mortality often have been limited by inadequate methods for reverse causation, inability to assess effects over time, and limited information on mediators and cause-specific mortality. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate associations between attendance at religious services and subsequent mortality in women. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: Attendance at religious services w…
Psychology (85 works) · Medicine (76 works) · Social Psychology (56 works) · Psychological Well-being and Life Satisfaction (42 works) · Sociology (38 works) · Psychiatry (36 works) · Political science (30 works) · Public health (30 works) · Clinical Psychology (29 works) · Health disparities and outcomes (29 works)