Peer-reviewed article
Constructing indicators of child well-being from a child standpoint
Tobia Fottore, Jan Mason ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-sonnet-5-5This paper presents a set of well-being indicator concepts built from children's own understandings and experiences. The concepts come from multi-stage qualitative research. The authors describe three key domains (agency, security/safety, self/identity) and three dimensions (leisure, economic well-being, health). They also set out what makes these indicators distinctive and discuss what they mean for services working with children.
Key points
- Well-being frameworks developed from children's perspectives are rare, partly because building indicators from those perspectives is difficult.
- The indicator concepts come from multi-stage qualitative research on children's understandings and experiences of well-being.
- Key domains identified are agency, security/safety and self/identity.
- Dimensions identified are leisure, economic well-being and health.
- Implications for services include recognising emotional complexity, focusing on lived experience and developmental outcomes, and considering systemic factors that affect individual well-being.
Limitations
The abstract does not give the number, ages or backgrounds of the children involved, or details of the methods, so we cannot judge how widely the findings apply. The country is taken from the metadata hint and is not stated in the abstract.
Abstract
The concept of well-being has gained increasing currency as policy makers and service providers working in the child welfare sector have aimed to shift their work from compliance based to child-centred approaches. This is also evident in the efforts of national and international monitoring agencies, who have developed indicator frameworks measuring children's well-being outcomes. However, well-being frameworks developed from children's perspectives are rare, in part because of the challenges involved in developing indicators from children's perspectives. In this paper we present a set of wellbeing indicator concepts developed from multi-stage qualitative research exploring children's understandings and experiences of well-being. We outline key domains (agency, security/safety, self/identity) and dimensions (leisure, economic well-being, health) of wellbeing derived from a child standpoint before outlining the distinctive features of these indicator concepts. We conclude by discussing implications for service provision, namely the importance of emotional complexity in service work; an emphasis on lived experience and developmental outcomes in service goals; and the necessity to consider systemic factors as impacting individual well-being.