Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 29 was used to analyse the data and the data file is an SPSS file. The main data consists of Likert-scale items for the Mental Health Continuum Short Form, the Flourishing Scale and the Fragility of Happiness Scale collected from South African participants in a higher education institution in the year 2023. This is the original dataset (with all personal and identifying information removed and missing values retained as missing values).