Using Indicators of Child Well-Being at the International Level

Abstract

I have, for many years, used quantitative data to compare the well-being of children across countries. This research includes, for example, international comparisons of child poverty and inequality using the Luxembourg Income Study (e.g., Phipps, 1999) as well as international comparisons of children’s health and well-being (e.g., overall health status, obesity, asthma, anxiety, hyperactivity, overall “success at school”) using a variety of reasonably comparable microdata surveys such as the Statistics Canada National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Mother/Child Supplement, the Health Survey for England and the Norwegian Health Survey (e.g., Phipps, 2001, 2002, 2004). However, I have never formally studied and am not aware of existing scientific research on how to make indicators “work,” the topic of our recent meeting and this book. In fact, it is worth pausing to consider from the beginning what exactly we might mean by the word “work” in this context. Personally, in common with most other authors in this volume (e.g., Titler and Ben-Arieh), I would regard an indicator of child well-being as working if its use resulted in improved lives for at least some children. Concretely, though, how could quantitative data on outcomes for children actually achieve such an objective? Since I can in no way claim to know how best to use indicators of child wellbeing at the international level, in what follows I simply provide some reflections based on my own experiences in this area. That is, I attempt to organize some thoughts about cases in which my work with quantitative measures of child outcomes was well received by other scholars, by policymakers, and/or by the general public, and other situations in which I encountered resistance. It is probably important to note at the outset that I am a Canadian academic and that my experiences are very much situated within the Canadian policy context. How then, can international indicators of child well-being have an impact on children’s lives? Two general roles come to mind. First, indicators may help improve knowledge or understanding; second, indicators may help persuade. Consider how indicators can help to increase understanding (see also Moore and Brown, 2005, this volume, who describe a hierarchy of uses for indicators). First, one extremely useful function of quantitative indicators as a means for understanding child outcomes is that the use of indicators forces a certain precision of definition so that everyone can see (in the computer code, if need be), exactly what is meant by otherwise potentially somewhat vague, though very important, constructs such