Measuring children and young people’s subjective wellbeing: conceptual framework

Publication type

Report

Authors

Publication date

September 15, 2021

Summary:

While we have very good national data on the wellbeing of adults, the national statistics on children and young people’s wellbeing in the UK, is not collected regularly, or nationally.

A key role for the What Works Centre for Wellbeing is to create robust, consistent wellbeing measures that can be used with confidence for different purposes and groups in the UK. With this project, we have developed a framework to measure the subjective wellbeing of children and young people, an area with growing national interest, particularly as a result of Covid-19.

Conceptual Framework:

In this paper we provide an overview of what children and young people’s wellbeing is. We outline the differences between objective and subjective measures of wellbeing, as well as providing definitions for the various constructs and terminology that is used to describe different concepts associated with subjective wellbeing from the literature, and how this can be applied to children and young people.

We also outline why we believe that measuring children and young people’s subjective wellbeing is important, not only for its ability to inform policy and practical decisions that impact on the lives of children in the UK, but because there is validity in asking young people themselves how they are doing.

Subjects

Link

https://whatworkswellbeing.org/resources/measuring-children-and-young-peoples-subjective-wellbeing/

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