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Dictionary definitions of well-being emphasize a desirable state of being happy,
healthy, or prosperous; that is, well-being refers to both subjective feelings and
experiences as well as to living conditions. Well-being is also related to the
fulfillment of desires, to the balance of pleasure and pain, and to opportunities for
development and self-fulfillment. The concept refers to the qualities of life and to
the many possible dimensions of a good or bad life. The breadth and heterogeneity
of the idea of well-being is illustrated in human rights treaties, including the UN
Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Rights are implicitly understood as
creating well-being or opportunities for well-being, referring to the quality of
children’s lives economically and emotionally; to their psychological states; to
their material, social, and cultural environments; as well as to their development
and to realizing their potentials.
Perspectives on well-being provide a common ground for scholarly study and
for diverse systems of indicators. The field bridges research and policymaking.
These integrative functions are rooted both in the multidimensional character
and in the normative core of the concept itself. The focus is on the level of
well-being, the scale ranging from good to bad, involving implicit or explicit
normative assessments. These judgments entail normative discourses – what is
good or bad on the many dimensions of well-being – as part of analyses. The
focus on children’s well-being is also sensitive to children’s vulnerability;
children are especially at risk with regard to adverse trends and this risk factor
is reflected in the number of organizations and institutions dedicated to the
protection of children.
A look at some of the titles behind the nearly 1,000,000,000 internet hits
for “well-being and children” illustrates the multifaceted nature of the concept.
Articles and headlines brought up by such a search refer to material well-being,
emotional well-being, families and well-being, upbringing and well-being,
health and well-being, and to a myriad of subthemes like social capital in
relation to well-being, unintended pregnancy and well-being, and sickness and
well-being – in short a plethora of themes can be found related to well-being and
children. This implies not only that the concept of well-being is regarded as
fruitful from many perspectives but also that it is a valuable perspective on all
aspects of children’s lives. The heterogeneity of the concept not only makes it
relevant to different perspectives but also gives a common direction to distinct
studies in different domains.
In disciplines and domains related to the development of policies and treatments,
improvement in well-being has always been the point of departure. The increased
monitoring of children’s lives through the development of indicators and the
explicit relationships between indicators and policies has brought normative assessments
into most studies of childhood and children. Well-being represents
a conceptual framework that merges empirical studies and normative assessments
as it also bridges policies and research.
As the perspective of GDP and “standard of living” were gradually recognized as
too narrow to grasp desired societal outcomes of economic policies, well-being
became the point at which political, theoretical, and empirical perspectives on
welfare and development converged. As an analytical and normative point of
departure, the concept of well-being represents not only a new perspective on the
quality of life and on positive and negative developments on the macro or societal
level but also a framework fulfilling what Fitoussi et al. (2010) refer to as the
multiple purposes of measurements that may capture details on the microlevels of
lived experience.
Well-being refers to individuals as well as to societies and to trends as well as to
states. The concept as implemented in research and policy encourages not only
measuring well-being but also reflecting on the very idea of what well-being is, on
the different domains and related perspectives, and on the individual, group, and
global levels. Well-being is the conceptual focal point for assessing the state of
children and the discourses on their status.
2 A. Ben-Arieh et al.
1.1 The Meaning of Well-Being
The Constitution of the World Health Organization states that “Health is a state of
complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of
disease or infirmity.” The WHO statement also illustrates that well-being does not
refer primarily to the moment, but to something that lasts over time, even if there is
some overlap with happiness and the subjective experiences of the moment. The
boundaries of the notion of well-being are elastic; in spite of this, the fact that
the concept can convey a reasonable pre´cis, as illustrated by the WHO statement,
made well-being a functional concept after the discourse on societal development
and welfare transcended the perspective of GDP. The ability to work on different
levels, themes, and perspectives, and the association with happiness as well as
welfare, makes the notion of well-being functional for many purposes.
In philosophy the well-being of a person in general refers to what is good for the
individual from their own perspective. The hedonist equation of well-being as the
best possible balance between pain and pleasure makes intuitive sense at one level
but is problematic at another. The sum of all subjective facets of well-being do not
necessarily aggregate to what may be best at the macro level, as illustrated by the
detrimental effect that consumption has in global considerations. The tensions
among subjective and objective well-being and its indicators, between the moment
and possible future consequences, and between the individual and the macro level
illustrate the challenges of theorizing well-being.
This is even more complex in relation to children; well-being encompasses both
children’s lives in the present and how the present influences their future and their
development. Children’s development is not a delimited psychological issue but is
related to characteristics at the societal level; various societies not only influence
social and cognitive development in various ways but require different levels of
competencies for members at different ages or of different genders. The emphasis
of the CRC (a legally binding normative instrument setting the standards for
children’s well-being in a series of domains in life), which underlines that the
child has a right to education and to “develop its personality and abilities to the
fullest” (Article 29), is implicitly related to the evolution of the educational
knowledge society. Such norms are not detailed prescriptions. For example, general
agreement on the principle that children should not live in poverty requires an
elaboration of what poverty for children implies; underscoring the child’s right to
develop his or her potential illustrates that poverty cannot be delimited by a purely
material standard.
Ongoing considerations with respect to child development from a global vantage
point require further elaboration of the understanding of well-being as related to
multiple perspectives, positions, and domains. The evaluation of the distribution of
well-being with regard to children is especially complex because children are
developing and because they are dependent on caretakers on the micro level as
well as on politics and economy at the macro level. Children’s well-being is rooted
in the interplay of a series of factors on the micro level, framed by the social
structures of the wider society.
The CRC emphasized children’s rights in general terms but did not go further
into the relations between rights, freedom, and development. These relations are
complex. For example, economic growth may be related to well-being not through
subjective mirroring of wealth and income but through material standards that
result in benefits to a population. Commodities are a means to an end; the point is
to understand what one can achieve with resources, which is related to both
opportunity structures and the agency of the subject (Sen 1999).
Freedom is related not only to the right to use one’s resources in accordance with
one’s own preferences but also to the capacity to transform resources into valuable
activities. Related to children, the development of capacities to transform resources
into valuable activities is an essential part of well-being. Values are not only subject
to variation among individuals or groups and between these levels of organization
as well, but values vary with capacities for reflection. In regard to children this
implies that the right to well-being involves the right to the development of
capacities for reflection as well as the right to freedom of choice. At the macro
level well-being will be related to freedom not only in an abstract way but to the
fairness of the actual distribution of opportunities. The well-being of a nation is
related to both the sum of well-being and to its distribution.
Aristotle underlined the pursuit of happiness alone as shallow; the good life for
humans is to be understood in terms of the virtuous activities of humans, aimed at
meeting a worthwhile purpose. From this perspective, well-being comprises more
than individual happiness or individual wealth; it is rather a measure of carefully
considered productivity and engagement.
1.2 Complex Roots of Well-Being
Happiness is in general understood as a basic indicator of subjective well-being, yet one
that is difficult to capture by measurement. The Easterlin paradox states that after
reaching a level where basic needs are covered, increased income on a national level
does not increase the general level of happiness. Others argue that there is a relationship
(Hagerty and Veenhoven 2003). The discourses on quality of life illustrate the many
dimensions of well-being and the complex relations between subjective and objective
indicators of a good life; they underscore that well-being is not identical to the
indicators of the standard of living. Poverty may engender a lack of subjective wellbeing,
but poverty itself is not identical to negative well-being. Reasonable standards of
living and freedom can be understood as prerequisites for positive well-being, but do
not represent happiness. Even though studies indicate a complex relationship between
happiness and contextual factors framing subjective experiences, objective indicators
of living conditions such as GNP are often used as indices of a good life. These
representational efforts may be rooted in tacit assumptions of a positive correlation
between objective indicators and subjective experiences as well as in the availability of
objective indicators. The composite “Human Development Index” measures quality of
life through interrelated assessments of life expectancy, wealth and education, with
well-being understood as the potential for a good life reflected by these indicators.
4 A. Ben-Arieh et al.
Studies of children’s well-being in general focus on trends in different groups and
on developmental foundations of well-being, addressing risk as well as what enables
children to flourish (Moore and Lippman 2005). On the micro level, achievements
seem to facilitate happiness (Howell 2009), and the level of well-being is influenced
by the reference groups with whom one compares himself or herself (Carbonell 2005).
Further, studies of well-being, and the system of indicators tracking this concept,
refer to specific areas of life and to the present as well as the future. In recent
decades the development of longitudinal datasets has expanded the possibilities for
studying the relationship between early childhood and later phases. Trajectories
identified are related not only to the life courses of children but also to societal
characteristics; for example, conditions in early childhood may predict unemployment
in adulthood (Caspi et al. 1998), which is, in turn, related to the knowledge
economy. Longitudinal studies also provide new opportunities for studying the
relationship between biological and social factors and dynamics that through
developmental processes reinforce initial inequalities among children.
Sen (1999) illustrates that well-being is related to opportunity, to the capacity to
utilize distinct opportunities, as well as to the freedom to do so in correspondence
with one’s own preferences. As such, well-being is directly related to the perspectives
and needs of the individual understood within their social milieu. In this arena,
children’s own perspectives and voices have often been forgotten. Children are both
on their way to a future as adults, involving the rights to develop their abilities, and
they are citizens of the present, with the rights to immediate well-being as children.
This child-centered focus is one that must increasingly be incorporated in studies of
well-being.
1.2.1 Domains of Child Well-Being
Any comprehensive attempt to look at children’s well-being must balance the
various socioeconomic and cultural domains of children’s lives and be carefully
constructed to include current but historically often excluded subpopulations of
children, e.g., those with disabilities; indigenous minorities; very poor or isolated
populations; those separated from families; and those who are homeless, refugees,
or immigrants (Andrews and Ben-Arieh 1999).
Within each domain, preferences and values are socially based but they are not
socially determined; well-being emerges at the intersection of agency and society’s
frameworks. Within these frameworks, well-being is differentially pertinent and
must be differentially assessed. The complexity of the concept is indeed illustrated
by the tension among domains: Good well-being in one sector of life does not
immunize children from poor well-being in other domains. In part well-being is
related to domains because policies are sectored themselves. Housing policies, for
example, need information on children’s housing as well as on their particular
needs related to housing and these derive from different vantage points. When
UNICEF emphasizes children’s need for a place to do homework, the educational
society and the knowledge economy are contributing to the assessment of specific
educational needs related to children and their home environments; citizenship as
a domain is rooted in political ideology and rights.
Domains can be construed in various ways, based on differing perspectives and
methodologies. Key national indicators on well-being for American children focus
on indicators from seven domains: family and social environment, economic
circumstances, health care, physical environment and safety, behavior, education,
and health (Land et al. 2001). UNICEF’s Innocenti Report Card 7 (Adamson 2007)
refers to six dimensions of well-being: material well-being, health and safety,
educational well-being, family and peer relationships, behaviors and risks, and
subjective well-being (Bradshaw and Richardson 2009).
Domains can be assessed differently and that makes the process of measuring
well-being more complicated. Educational well-being can be evaluated with
subjective indicators such as children’s levels of enjoyment at school or by
objective indicators such as investment in education. In Report Card 7, educational
well-being is indicated by an evaluation of scholastic performance. The set
of indicators not only represents different vantage points or values within
domains, but the domains themselves may be partly defined by an evaluative
approach. Take, for instance, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index of US
residents’ health and well-being. This index refers to domains including life
evaluation, emotional health, physical health, healthy behavior, and work
environment. To this is added what is called “basic access”: a component of
well-being related to satisfaction with the community or area, economic situation,
access to medical treatment, health care, and other basic necessities. Many
measures on quality of life in the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index illustrate
that domains do not exist outside the realm of culture and ideology. Different
societies and different periods construct domains in different ways. As a result,
the assessment of well-being must be a culturally and historically particular
process prior to comparative or global treatments.
1.2.2 Historical Development of the Study of Well-Being
Reflections on present senses of “well-being” may be explored throughout history,
among philosophers, religions, literature, and so on. Different notions have existed
in different cultures and historical periods. What is good for children? What are the
qualities of a good life for children? How do standards of well-being change as
children develop? What are the goals of children’s development, education, and
socialization? The answers to such questions are related to beliefs, stereotypes,
values, “logics,” and social representations and should be examined by researchers
looking into how adults in a given society construct (1) childhood, (2) the social
problems and social needs of children involving social policies and requiring
social interventions, and (3) the best methods for solving children’s social problems
and requirements.
Studying the phenomenon of things going awry has been a major focus of
interest for human and social sciences. For example, for centuries medicine concentrated on illness/disease/sickness. However, a few decades ago interest in
well-being began to complement the illness orientation: for example, through
health promotion. This change of perspective, from negatively valenced challenges
to positive constructs, is a silent but far-reaching revolution. Social and behavioral
scientists have also long emphasized the emergence and development of social
problems and only recently turned to studies promoting well-being or quality
of life. While historically psychology focused on curing mental illness, in 1969,
G.A. Miller, in his famous speech as new president of the American Psychological
Association, proposed to redefine psychology as a “means to promote human wellbeing.”
In recent decades many researchers have taken up this charge and moved to
focus on a new perspective, positive psychology, the psychology of positive human
functioning (Seligman 2002).
The contemporary history of the concept of well-being as linked to scientific
research (both basic and applied) shows two completely separate trajectories, both
of them starting in the twentieth century and developing independently for
some decades. One contemporary tradition of studying well-being comes
from the health sciences and the other one from the social sciences. The health
sciences situate their beginnings in the WHO constitution, in 1946, which states
that health is not only the absence of illness or disease but also the presence of
well-being. This principle has been repeated in several WHO documents in the
following decades and has promoted extensive research (Andelman et al. 1999;
WHO 1946, 1978).
The tradition in social sciences was by contrast born in association with the
so-called “social indicators movement” in the 1960s and appeared as an interdisciplinary
approach involving economists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists,
geographers, and other disciplinary experts. Bauer’s book on social
indicators (Bauer 1966) is considered by many to be the starting point for the
movement toward a new concept: “the quality of life (QOL).” By that period – the
end of the 1960s – serious attempts to develop significant research about people’s
happiness, psychological well-being or satisfaction with life, or specific domains of
life appeared and initiated important scientific debates (Casas 1989, 1991, 1996a).
After decades in which this phenomena has been considered subjective and
therefore “of no scientific value”, researchers have moved to develop different
theoretical conceptualizations and scientific models for QOL, trying to reconcile
material (“objective”) and nonmaterial (“subjective”) aspects of the human and
sociocultural environment.
Quality of life is defined as a construct articulating objective and subjective
measures of people’s conditions of living: It is a function of the material (Mcl) and
the psychosocial (PScl) conditions of living, that is to say, QOL ¼ f(Mcl, PScl).
Defining the material conditions of living is not new. However, defining psychosocial
conditions of living (measurable only with subjective indicators) is relatively
new and has initiated endless debates. Probably one of the more useful definitions
for psychosocial conditions of living was presented by Campbell et al. (1976) when
they proposed it should include perceptions, evaluations, and aspirations of people
on their own lives. This also became one of the best-known definitions of subjective
well-being. Many authors consider subjective well-being as closely related or
even synonymous with other psychologically positive constructs, particularly
“happiness” and “life satisfaction.”
Following Bauer’s introductory discussions, the concept of “QOL” was taken
immediately into health sciences research. Most authors working in this area started
to use the phrase as synonymous with well-being, thinking that well-being was rooted
in a much older tradition and, therefore, not a new concept. However, in social
sciences quality of life has never been considered synonymous with well-being but is
rather treated as a broader concept. During the last two decades, a new concept “H-R
QOL” (Health-Related Quality of Life) has created a pathway along which
a reciprocal understanding between the two disciplinary traditions may develop.
In the meanwhile, inside the social and behavioral sciences and particularly inside
psychology, the humanistic tradition made specific new contributions to debates on
subjective well-being developing a focus on “psychological well-being.” By contrast
with the mainstream hedonic tradition in social science relating good life to happiness
and satisfaction with overall life, authors in the alternative eudaimonic tradition
defend a good life as related to fulfillment, self-determination, and meaning.
The health-related tradition has contributed to the knowledge of child well-being
mainly with research focused on clinical populations, before and after health
interventions. The social sciences-related traditions began slowly focusing on
adult subjects moving on to issues of child well-being only several decades later.
Even with the move to studies of child well-being in the social and behavioral
disciplines, there was a particular reluctance to study children’s subjective
well-being.
In recent decades, there has been an increasing amount of research on children’s
and adolescents’ well-being in general (non-clinical) populations. Much of this
involves developing and testing psychometric instruments, most based on the
hedonic tradition with almost no instruments specific for children or adolescents
provided by the eudaimonic tradition. Additionally, recent years have shown an
increasing amount of qualitative research with children, related to their well-being.
With the number of indicators of well-being growing, it is notable that in many
situations, subjective and material components of QOL are not correlated. “Objective”
measures by experts and “subjective” satisfaction of users of services may not
correlate at all. Years of debates have ultimately shown that what is scientifically
relevant in this regard is not the question “who is right?” but “why different
“observers” (i.e., social agents) disagree?” Sorting through the diverse measures
of well-being may be a first step to answering this question.
In recent years, a broad consensus among researchers has arisen, considering
psychological well-being a key component of QOL. Authors name this phenomena
subjective well-being (Diener 1984; Huebner 1991; Huebner et al. 1998), psychological
well-being (Casas 1998; Ryff 1989), human well-being (Blanco et al. 2000),
social well-being (Keyes 1998), or subjective quality of life (Cummins and Cahill
2000). Starting with the 1960s (Bradburn 1969; Bradburn and Caplovitz 1965),
most authors today agree that well-being has an important subjective dimension and
that this dimension has an affective component related to the “happiness” concept.
Another important and more cognitive dimension of well-being is “satisfaction”
with life domains and with life as a whole. Both the affective and the cognitive
dimensions are considered indicators or outcomes of good psychological conditions
of living. Additionally, there is accumulated evidence in localized and crosscultural
studies that well-being is correlated with other positive constructs such as
self-esteem, perceived control, perceived social support (Huebner 2004; Casas et al.
2007), values (Diener and Fujita 1995; Diener et al. 1998; Csikzentmihalyi 1997;
Coenders et al. 2005).
According to Diener’s (1984) review, there is a broad consensus that subjective
well-being has three basic characteristics: (1) It is grounded in each person’s
experiences, and in his or her perceptions and evaluations of such experiences;
(2) it includes positive measures and not only the absence of negative aspects; and
(3) it includes some overall evaluation of life, usually named “life satisfaction.”
However, since Andrews and Withey (1976) proposed a one-item life satisfaction
index, this has been widely used as a basic indicator of well-being although with
different formats (i.e., Cantrils’ ladder), and it has also been used with children and
adolescents. Some authors consider this single item a higher-order measure of wellbeing
(Cummins 1998) than the aggregated more focused measures, and it is frequently
combined in questionnaires with other multi-items scales. Satisfaction with
life as a whole is understood by many authors to be a global evaluation of life
(Veenhoven 1994). Overall life satisfaction (OLS) is considered “more than” satisfaction
with a set of life domains. On the other hand, life-domains satisfaction and
OLS can be explained both through individual and cultural differences (Diener 1984).
Many other authors have underlined how important satisfaction with specific life
domains is for personal well-being. In the scientific literature long discussions have
ensued about which are the most relevant life domains for an assessment of global
life satisfaction. Cummins (1998) considers life-domains satisfaction a second
order level and proposed the Personal Well-Being Index to evaluate life satisfaction
with only seven different primary life domains, which he hypothesizes are the most
cross-culturally relevant.
When the concept QOL was defined in the 1960s, its political implications were
“obvious”: Any society or any social group changing “for the better” would
improve the quality of the lives of its citizens. Any valuable service will improve
the quality of life of their clients or users. This implied that by improving material
conditions of living, the psychosocial conditions of living and QOL would improve.
However, while the meaning of “improving material conditions of living” is often
clear, it has never been easy to specify how to improve the “psychosocial conditions
of living” of a general population, particularly when subjective well-being is
included. Today we know that the quality of public services and relative wealth
do contribute to subjective well-being but less than expected, particularly for
people at median levels of QOL or above, as is typical in more industrialized
countries. Additionally there are external factors related to interpersonal relationships
that contribute to subjective well-being and may be difficult to measure.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the primary scholarly debate is focused
on two significant dimensions of subjective well-being – happiness and life satisfaction. The crucial point can be formulated with a question mark: Should
governments develop policies aimed to increase citizens’ happiness or satisfaction
with life? What would such policies be like?