The Good Childhood Index
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Contents |
Overview
The latest development in The Children's Society’s (TCS) well-being research programme is their new index of subjective well-being for children aged 8 and over - The Good Childhood Index. TCS wanted to develop an index of children’s well-being that is statistically robust and covers the main aspects of children’s lives, including those identified by children themselves.
The Good Childhood Index includes a five-item measure of life satisfaction, a single-item measure of happiness with life as a whole, and a series of questions about well-being in ten key areas of children’s lives. Analysis of the 2008 survey yielded the discovery that these ten areas explained over half of the variation in overall well-being:
- Family
- Friends
- Health
- Appearance
- Time use
- The future
- Home
- Money and possessions
- School
- Amount of choice.
Usage
The Good Childhood Index can be used in two broad ways:
The short index, which was launched in October 2010, has been designed to measure trends and variations in children’s subjective well-being at a population level. This index was tested with a representative sample of 8 to 15 year olds in July and October 2010, and shows good stability and validity. TCS will use the index to monitor children and young people’s well-being on an ongoing basis with a quarterly survey of 2,000 8 to 15 year olds.
There is also potential for the short index to be used to measure change in overall well-being for smaller samples of children and young people, for example, at the school or local authority level.
The longer index is almost complete, parts of it are validated and already in use. It will be useful for organisations that want to evaluate their work and measure change in the well-being of the children and young people that they work with. Organisations will be able to choose from a menu of multi-item measures for the ten key areas mentioned above. It will be launched in its entirety in Spring 2011.
Publications
The Good Childhood Index - Summary
The Good Childhood Index - Full Report
