Predictive factors of Black American emerging adults’ psychological flourishing: a random forest analysis

Flourishing reflects positive psychosocial functioning and well-being. In this study, recent psychological distress was indexed using the CDC Healthy Days mental health item (mentally unhealthy days), reverse-coded as good mental health days. Emerging adulthood (18–29) is pivotal for mental health, yet robust predictors of flourishing among Black American emerging adults are understudied. We analyzed data from 513 participants (Mage = 23.6, SD = 3.35) using a 1,000-tree Random Forest with SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP). Performance was stable using out-of-bag (OOB) internal validation (OOB R2 = 0.267; test R2 = 0.245; RMSE = 1.044). JHAC was the dominant predictor, followed by good mental health days and good physical health days; discrimination and sleep showed smaller contributions, and substance use contributed least. Models included demographic covariates (age, education, religion, marital status, employment, female, parenting status, and having children). SHAP interaction values suggested conditional effects involving JHAC, including a pattern consistent with buffering in the association between current discrimination and flourishing. Methodologically, random forest and SHAP yielded transparent, individual-level explanations, revealing nonlinearities and interactions without pre-specification.