Childrens Wellbeing

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Childrens Wellbeing

Approaches to research, monitoring
participation
Laura Camfield, Natalia Streuli, Martin
Woodhead QEH, Oxford CREET, Open
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What is Young Lives?

• Innovative international research project,
  investigating the changing nature of childhood
  poverty
• Ethiopia, India (Andhra Pradesh), Peru and
  Vietnam
• Longitudinal designover 15 years
• Quantitative and qualitative methods
• Research and policy components

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What do we do?

• 12,000 children through a 15-year period
• Two groups of children in each country
• 2000 children aged between 6 months and 17 months
  in 2002
• 1000 children aged between 7.5 years old and 8.5
  years old in 2002
• Sentinel site sampling - 20 sites per country -
  pro-poor sample, selected by location, ethnicity,
  educational participation, etc

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Quantitative 4 countries x 3000 children 20
sites 2 cohorts Rounds 1 2
Policy and Communications Component e.g. Child
Budget Policy Monitoring, Participatory
Qualitative 4 sites per country 12 case studies
per site 2 cohorts aged 6 12 Qual 1 2
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Qualitative research summary

• Detailed description of childrens daily lives
  and well-being in specific YL communities
• Childrens (and caregivers) perspectives on
  policies and services
• Childrens changing fortunes during key
  transition periods in young lives

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• What do children and their carers in contexts of
  poverty understand by child wellbeing how do
  their views compare, and change over time?

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Qualitative methods timeline

• Group-based participatory methods with children,
  caregivers other stakeholders
• In-depth case study interviews with YL children,
  caregivers other stakeholders
• Child-focused observation in home, school,
  community
• Both cohorts
• Qual 1 2007, Qual 2 2008

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Wellbeing exercise(researchers notes, Debre
2007)

Afework explains that a child that is doing well
goes to a school that has a field and
equipment for kids to play on such as a shertete
(slide), jiwajiwe (swing), and merry-go-round.
The school is not far from his home, it has
good classrooms and clean toilets for boys and
girls separately and it also has a library One
of the children asked Afework another question
children with a good life have to have school
bags but you drew a child holding his exercise
books with hands, not in a bag. So, how does a
boy that is doing well does not have a bag for
his books? Afework answered the question by
asking them a question. Does living well means
being rich? and he himself answered it by saying
no, living well does not mean being rich
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Wellbeing exercise
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One childs data mosaic
Community Profile
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Conceptualising childrens wellbeing (with
thanks to Andy Dawes)

• Four understandings of wellbeing
• As the outcome of a set of domains
• As relational
• As a lens that determines what is seen
• As a process in cultural time combining
  childrens unfolding capacities with social
  transitions in particular locations
• Key questions
• What is the cultural tool kit for wellbeing
  to what extent is it globalised or particular?
• What scaffolds can policy intervention provide
  to
• support its development?

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1. How can a wellbeing approach make a
difference to the lives of children in poverty?

• By improving the quality of research
  encouraging more cautious interventions?
• acts as a bridging concept across roles
  disciplines
• makes children, their relationships, settings,
  activities, material cultural resources the
  focus of enquiry
• enables a nuanced understanding of the material
  (e.g. importance of feeling equal to others)
• acknowledges diversity, contestation, inequality
  also commonality - what holds children together
  (biology, education for all, global media,
  etc.) as well as what separates them

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2. Could a wellbeing focus further
de-politicise development?

• Negative implications
• de-politicise adversity (White 2008)
• individuate human responses to it (Heath 1999
  Sointu 2005)
• disguise the selective promotion of certain
  means for living certain sorts of life
  (Seedhouse 199568)
• presuppose a much more complete agreement on the
  relative importance of the different social ends
  than actually exists (Johns Ormerod 2007 107)
• encourage hubris of govt. planners
  practitioners who failing to improve basic
  services are now turning to well-being
  (Alibhai-Brown 2007)

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2. Could a wellbeing focus further
de-politicise development?

• Positive potential
• create a discursive space for discussion of
  development goals in non-technical terms
• provide a language to make claims for resources
  acknowledge stakeholders experiences
• become an organising principle provide shared
  set of minimum standards (cf best interests),
  acknowledging that detailed specification of
  well-being is negotiable
• recognise the conflicts that arise when we
  consider the well-being aspirations of different
  people in our societies and return an analysis
  of power and political relationships to the heart
  of our inquiry (McGregor et al. 20073)

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3. Can a wellbeing focus avoid a collapse into
the psychosocial?

• Whats wrong with the psychosocial?
• Operates at many levels -
• Individual childrens subjective evaluations of
  psychosocial wellbeing, including quality of
  their experiences, as outcomes mediating
  factors
• Social Children are fundamentally social
  beings, for whose mental and emotional health it
  is vital to enjoy positive connections with
  others a sense of consistency, continuity and
  reciprocity in relationships
• (Hart 200424)
• Cultural Psychosocial well being is always
  contextual, and the context is peoples personal
  experiences, relationships, values, culture and
  understandings (De Berry et al 20031)
• Not the whole, but one aspect to be acknowledged
  measured alongside conventional domains

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Good lives across 3 communities
4. Are there universal dimensions of wellbeing?
If so what are they?
Source YL-Ethiopia qual, 2007
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5. Can we measure collective wellbeing? How?
Yes and No - experienced well-being is inevitably
personal, as while it is created sustained with
others, in particular collectivities, under
particular conditions, during particular
historical periods, etc., it is measured
individually However

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5. Can we measure collective wellbeing? How?
Can we understand the life of an individual child
in the context of their family, household,
community, nation, etc. how this life is
connected to representative of many other
lives? Yes Can we follow the trajectory of a
household across time space? Yes Can we
establish how people in a community understand
wellbeing whether they feel they have the
resources to realise this? Yes Can we identify
communities that are not perceived as providing
conditions for wellbeing understand why, how
this has changed over time? Yes Can we judge if
the well-being of members of a community is
likely to be threatened by a policy/
intervention? Yes

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For more information about Young Lives

• http//younglives.org.uk
• Young Lives is funded by the UK Department for
  International Development (DFID) and based on a
  collaborative partnership between the University
  of Oxford, Save the Children UK, the Open
  University and a series of prominent national
  research and policy institutes in four study
  countries. It receives partial funding from the
  Bernard van Leer Foundation.