Children’s Understandings of Well-Being in Global and Local Contexts: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations for a Multinational Qualitative Study

Abstract

Research on child well-being is an expanding international, inter- and trans-disciplinary field of research that has developed significantly within the last decades. While the achievements in the field are immense, the developments raise new challenges for the child well-being research field. In this paper three major challenges will be highlighted and discussed: Firstly, challenges regarding how to define well-being theoretically, secondly; challenges associated with integrating children’s perspectives in research; and thirdly, challenges of engaging with processes of globalisation and trans-national contexts which impact on children’s well-being and how we engage with these processes as researchers. We then outline a comparative qualitative study “Children’s understandings of well-being - global and local contexts” that attempts to respond to these challenges: by starting with children’s constructions of well-being as a basis for analysing the normativity of constructions of well-being; by explicitly accounting for the context in which these constructions are developed -embedding children’s perspectives within the social orders they are part of and contribute to; and by empirically analysing the relevance of multi-scalar contexts as social constructions for children’s understandings and experiences of well-being.