This book reports on the findings from a large, qualitative research
project that set out to explore the views of children and young people
across New South Wales, Australia on what constitutes their well-being.
The research explores what meanings children and young people ascribe to
the concept, and identifies key domains of well-being to be used to
monitor the well-being of children, at a population level, throughout
New South Wales (and beyond) in an ongoing way. The research was
conducted by the New South Wales Commission for Children and Young
People in collaboration with researchers from the Social Justice and
Social Change Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney.
The methodology for the project involved children as co-constructors of
knowledge at the data gathering and analysis stages of the project.
Central to this collaborative approach was the iterative nature of our
engagement and dialogue with the children, before and during our
research interactions with them. The research was conducted over three
stages involving either individual or group interviews and employing a
range of task-oriented methods. A total of 123 children from both rural
and urban locations in New South Wales participated in the first stage
of the research. Of these, 92 children contributed to stage two and 53
to the final stage. The children, when initially recruited to the
project, were aged between eight and fifteen.
Over the last 20 years there has been an increasing concern to measure
children's health, welfare and well-being. Governments have responded to
calls that early intervention and prevention have cost-benefits in the
form of healthy, productive citizens and communities. As a consequence
tertiary response and economic rationalist models of policy making are
being moderated by well-being and primary prevention models. In
parallel, the importance of children's participation, especially in
decisions that affect their lives has been recognised and given impetus
by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Children
are increasingly given a chance to express their ideas in various
political forums, from the international to the local. Despite these
shifts towards focussing on well-being and children's participation,
very little research has drawn from both developments in endeavouring to
find out what children think about what well-being means to them.
Traditionally, adults have determined 'what's good for kids', where
their best interests lie and what the priorities should be in policy
areas of immediate concern to them.
This research was unique in that it has documented children's views
about what constitutes well-being for them, what makes them 'feel good'.
Two underlying aspects founded children's discussion of well-being,
emotional life and the significance of important relationships. These
two factors provided a medium that children used to discuss what was
important to well-being and allowed children to integrate complex and
contradictory experiences into their understanding of well-being Beyond
or, rather, building on this foundation, were three additional critical
factors: first, having power to take assert agency, to make choices;
secondly, a sense of security and safety; and, thirdly, a positive sense
of themselves as people. These three fundamental elements inform other
factors children say are important to children's well-being such as,
responding to adversity, attitudes to and having material and economic
resources, physical health, interaction with their environments and
social and moral responsibilities. These findings have formed the basis
for the final stage of the research - the development of indicators for
monitoring children's well-being. They have promoted international
interest in the research and in the outputs of the individual
researchers.
In a significant sense, the research can be described as comprising
three outputs or sets of insights. The first, outlined above, is the
detailed account of children's own understanding of what constitutes
their well-being. This is essentially an ethnographic account: the
findings reveal the meanings this group of children attach to
well-being, how well-being is experienced in everyday life and what
factors contribute to a sense of well-being. Epistemologically, it
represents a body of knowledge which has been constructed from a
children's standpoint, it sets out to give status to children's
knowledge about and experience of their world and their place in it. The
second contribution from this research is a reflection on methodology
and method. How does one do research with children in a respectful and
useful way and what have we learnt from our attempt to do so? The third
contribution has proved to be the most demanding of the three - the
attempt to develop indicators that are responsive to and reflect
children's understanding of their well-being, or to specify elements
that might be built into existing indicators so as to incorporate that
understanding in the way the indicator measures well-being.
The book will discuss all three contributions or outputs of the research
but the principal focus is on the final set of findings. Each of the
middle chapters will be devoted to one domain identified by children as
crucial to their well-being and will explore this domain and the
detailed meanings that children attached to it, drawing on the words and
images they employed and placing the discussion within the relevant
social science literature. The final chapters will reflect on the task
of developing indicators based on these understandings.
