Psychological flourishing: Validation of the French version of the Flourishing Scale and exploration of its relationships with personality traits

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to test the psychometric properties of the French version of the Flourishing Scale (FS, Diener et al., 2010) as a means to investigate the relationships between psychological flourishing and Big-Five personality traits. Participants for the study were 403 French sophomore students. Confirmatory factor analyses provided support for a single construct and an invariant structure of FS. Results revealed good fits in convergent validity through well-being related variables and the scale demonstrated satisfactory internal reliability. Correlation analysis indicated that conscientiousness had the highest positive correlation with psychological flourishing; extraversion and agreeableness were also positively related, whereas neuroticism was negatively related. A low positive correlation was also observed between FS and openness. Overall, personality traits accounted for 30% of variance in predicting psychological flourishing. Consistent with previous studies of associations between personality traits and well-being, our findings may well extend the concept of psychological flourishing.