Child Well-being In Rich Countries Research Articles

Theatre Elicitation: developing a potentially child-friendly method with children aged 8–12

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the growing body of literature published in Children Geographies on the importance of involving children in research processes. Inspired by participatory creative methods such as photo elicitation and popular/forum theatre, we have developed a potentially child-friendly tool referred to as Theatre Elicitation (TE). The objective of TE is to use theatre forms as a means of data collection in the context of a negotiated research process. In a pilot project in which we explore TE, children shared their perceptions of happiness. This was inspired by a UNICEF Report [2007. Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-being in Rich Countries. Innocenti Report Card 7. Florence: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre] that listed ‘Dutch children’ as the happiest of the world. The focus of this article is the development of TE as an interactive research tool. Insights were gained into the meaning of ‘child-friendly’ research, shifting power relations between children, peers and adults, and how children’s own positioning in lived experiences contextualized concepts such as ‘Dutch children’.

Child well-being in Canada: how can we improve on "average"?

Last summer, UNICEF released the 11th Innocenti Report Card on child well-being in rich countries.[1][1] In this document, 26 indicators are used to detail five dimensions of children’s lives: material well-being, health and safety, education, behaviours and risks, and housing and environment. In

Beyond indices: The potential of fuzzy set ideal type analysis for cross-national analysis of policy outcomes

League tables ranking performance outcomes within or between countries have become commonplace in most policy sectors in recent decades and there are numerous examples to be found in practice. UNICEF's 2007 Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries offered a comprehensive and widely cited comparative analysis of children's well being in 21 of the richest countries of the world. Utilising an additive index the authors distilled a large amount of quantitative data relating to children's well being and were able to provide the most comprehensive snapshot of outcomes to date. Whilst an advantage of the method – and certainly a key factor in generating media coverage – was the way it allowed for a ranking of nations, recent debates in the comparative policy analysis literature have pointed to the advantages of methods that aim to classify nations into qualitatively distinct types rather than ranking them in league tables. These debates have particular force when multiple components of analysis are conceptually distinct or cases have widely varying contexts. Fuzzy set ideal type analysis (FSITA) has become an increasingly popular alternative approach to the additive index, precisely because it addresses these concerns. In this paper we explore the potential for using FSITA for the comparative analysis of children's well-being. Drawing on the same data and conceptual foundations as the 2007 UNICEF study we explore the potential advantages of utilising a diversity oriented method such as FSITA as tool for policy evaluation that eschews ranking in favour of classifying.

Where Is Home?

Where Is Home?

Children’s Subjective Well-Being in Rich Countries

This paper is based on background research we undertook for UNICEF Innocenti Report Card 11 on child well-being in rich countries. It develops a new domain index of subjective well-being based on seven indicators drawn from the Health Behaviour of School Aged Children (HBSC) survey 2009/10, which includes life satisfaction, relationships with family and friends, well-being at school, and subjective health. It explores the associations between the indicators, components and the overall domain. Changes in subjective well-being between HBSC 2001/2 and 2009/10 are analysed. It then explores the relationships between subjective well-being and objective domains: material, health, education, behaviour and housing and environment. At a macro level subjective well-being is associated with all those domains. It concludes that subjective well-being should be included in comparative studies of well-being but not necessarily as just another domain. It is a related but different order measure.

What is wrong with children's well-being in the UK? Questions of meaning and measurement1

This paper discusses problems with existing attempts to measure children's well-being using secondary datasets, taking as an example the UNICEF Innocenti report entitled Child poverty in perspective: an overview of child well-being in rich countries (UNICEF 2007). The report placed the UK's children at the bottom of the league table of rich nations on their average score across six dimensions, including emotional well-being and ‘happiness’. The report's authors point to a number of problems with the available data and their uses of them. We seek to engage in a critical debate about the value of the report. We argue that it exemplifies a deficit model approach to the study of children's lives, as it appears to seek to demonstrate negative aspects of children's experiences. Its findings are frequently cited as scientific ‘fact’ in press reports about children and young people. In this paper, we discuss some problems with definitions of ‘well-being’, how well-being is measured, and how children's (human) rights are invoked. We also discuss the potential of research that takes a more positive approach to researching children's health, well-being and everyday lives.

Child Well-Being in Rich Countries: UNICEF’s Ranking Revisited, and New Symmetric Aggregating Operators Exemplified

In a report published in 2007 UNICEF measured six dimensions of child well-being for the majority of the economically advanced nations. No overall scores are given, but countries are listed in the order of their average rank on the dimensions, which are therefore implicitly assigned ‘equal importance’. In this study we take ‘equal importance’ to mean that the final aggregation is symmetrical in the scores and the ranks, i.e. permuting them leaves the aggregate unchanged. We rank the countries by aggregating the numerical information using a variety of techniques, geared to the measurement scales we distinguish (‘ordinal’, ‘interval’, ‘ratio’). The aggregators are symmetrical and mildly demanding, emphasizing good performance across the board. The rankings obtained deviate from the UNICEF ranking, but not over-dramatically. Our purpose is not only to study alternative approaches for the particular data at hand, but also to introduce and exemplify new and useful aggregation techniques: we propose ways to select weights for OWA-operators and weighted geometric means, and we suggest how to circumvent the choice of a power for the power means. In addition we extend the Borda method so that it values dominance as well.

Paediatricians and the UNICEF report on child well-being in rich countries

The recently published United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) review of child well-being1 concluded that children in the United Kingdom had the worst level of well-being of the 21 countries in...

Schools, Poverty, and the Achievement Gap

LAST June, representatives from more than 20 countries and several international agencies came together under the midnight sun in Trondheim, Norway, to discuss the challenge of creating greater in the outcomes of This meeting, sponsored by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Norwegian Ministry of Education, was the culmination of several years of work on the theme of equity in education. The OECD will shortly issue a report titled No More Failres, replete with analysis and recommendations on how to improve in educational outcomes. The concern for raising the bar and closing the in educational outcomes is now widespread around the world. Kappan readers will be familiar with the debate on the achievement gap, especially in the context of No Child Left Behind. In Europe, the results of (Programme for International Student Assessment--www.pisa.oecd.org) brought the issue into stark relief as well. PISA, a large, carefully designed study now involving more than 40 countries, tests 15-year-olds in reading, science, and mathematics. There have been two rounds of results so far, in 2000 and 2003, with a third due to be released this December. The findings of have been striking and consistent. Some countries that thought they were doing well educationally found that they had not only poor overall results but also very large gaps between their highest- and lowest-achieving students. In Germany, the phrase PISA Schock has come into the language as a sign of how serious the problem is. In contrast, some other countries, such as Finland, Korea, and--yes--Canada, showed very high overall results and much smaller gaps in their achievement distribution. The reality, in and in every other assessment of student outcomes, is that socioeconomic status remains the most powerful single influence on students' educational and other life outcomes. This is true in Finland and Canada as well as in the U.S. and everywhere else. Where you are born and grow up matters enormously to what you are able to be and do. A recent study in my home town of Winnipeg, using a database of all children born in the city in 1984, showed that, whereas 89% of all students writing the grade-12 language exam passed, only 12% of students whose families had received social assistance in the previous two years passed the exam.1 Indeed, a large proportion of this group was either a year or more behind or out of school entirely. Although the achievement gap in Canada is smaller than in the United States, it is far from trivial. UNICEF's Innocenti Research Centre recently released a report with the fascinating title of Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries (www.unicef-irc.org/publications). Using a rich array of data, it compares the situation of children in Canada, the U.S., the United Kingdom, and 18 other European countries on six dimensions, including material well-being, health and safety, education, peer and family relationships, behaviors and risks, and young people's subjective sense of well-being. No country ranks high on all six dimensions. The Netherlands gets the best overall score. Canada's average ranking across the six areas is 12th, while the U.S. and the U.K. are at the bottom. And the kicker is that the report concludes: Variation in government policy appears to account for most of the variation in child poverty levels between OECD countries. No OECD country devoting 10% or more of GDP to social transfers has a child poverty rate higher than 10%. No country devoting less than 5% of GDP to social transfers has a child poverty rate of less than 15%. (2) About 15% of Canadian children live in poverty, defined as living in a household with income less than 50% of the national median. What makes the Canadian situation galling is that in 1989 the Parliament of Canada passed a unanimous motion to end child poverty in the country by the year 2000. …

The UNICEF Report on Child Well-Being

Arecent report from the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, entitled “An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries,” assessed the general welfare of children in the European and North American countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). 1 The report, which recognizes that policy makers demand clarity, is an exercise in informed aggregation as the 40 examined indicators are summarized as 6 dimensions: Material Well-Being, Health and Safety, Educational Well-Being, Peer and Family Relationships, Behaviors and Risk, and Subjective Well-Being. A summary index was calculated for each dimension, and the average ranking across all the dimensions was then calculated for each country. The authors of the report have done a remarkable job analyzing and formatting the included indicators in a manner that permits valid cross-national comparisons. The United States and the United Kingdom had among the lowest summary rankings of child well-being of all the examined countries. Although the specific findings in the report should generate calls for better programs for children in these countries, the larger message of the report may lie in what was not explicitly stated but merely implied by the indices: that the relatively low ranking of child well-being reflects relatively high levels of social inequality. The strength of this relationship is suggested in the Figure, in which the report’s child well-being rankings are plotted against the most widely used indicator of inequality, the Gini coefficient, which summarizes the extent to which the distribution of incomes in a society departs from complete equality. 2 As is evident in the graph, the United States has by far the greatest inequality, with the UK coming close second, as well as the worst indicators of child well-being among the compared countries. The scale of social inequality in the United States translates directly into substantial levels of absolute poverty, particularly for children. When one adjusts for the purchasing capacity of different levels of income in each country, the poorest families in the United States fare worse than their counterparts in many of the other countries included in the UNICEF report. 3 Moreover, children are more heavily concentrated in the poorest segments of American society. Indeed, the material insecurity that a family with children currently feels is greater now than it has been since the Great Depression. 4 The number of children living in or near poverty in the United States is so large that virtually all indicators of child well-being that are sensitive to social status will prove to be relatively low in international comparisons. Beyond absolute levels of child poverty, the observed differences in social inequality are also associated with different political attitudes toward ameliorating poverty’s impact on children. A recent survey of attitudes toward income inequalities in OECD countries suggested that Americans are less aware of the actual scale of inequality at the top of their income distribution than was found in the other surveyed countries. 5 More important still was the finding that attitudes in the United States toward reducing income inequalities were more polarized than in the other countries. Americans had similar attitudes toward reducing inequalities between the highest income and middle income levels, but had less interest than in the other surveyed countries in reducing inequalities between the middle and lowest income levels. This is likely expressed in the relatively weak social programs in the United States dedicated to ameliorating the effect of poverty on child health and development. The United Kingdom provides an interesting contrast in view of its different European style political and welfare system. In the United Kingdom, under a Labour government, there has been a major shift in policy to reduce child poverty and improve educational attainment through major investment in deprived areas, an overarching set of targets (the Every Child Matters framework), and the appointments of an ombudsman for children and a children’s commissioner to oversee these policy developments. 6 One might have expected better progress with the United Kingdom’s well-developed and universal welfare system, which includes a health service that has received unprecedented levels of federal investment in recent years (although one must be cautious in approaching the data which are up to 7 years old). The indicators have all received the same weighting for simplicity, but whether this is a reasonable assumption may require more research. Nevertheless, for those looking at these data in the United Kingdom, there has been good progress in keeping children safe from injury, although the United Kingdom

Child wellbeing put into focus by report

WHOSE FAULT is it? Who should we blame? What can be done? The national newspapers must have rubbed their ink-stained hands with glee when they read the Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-being in Rich Countries report from Unicef, which stated rather bleakly that of all the children in the top 21 industrialised nations, the UK's fared the worst [see Letters, p14 and Latest Developments, p12].