5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Despite recent progress, major efforts are needed to improve child well-being data and indicators. For example, policymakers need the data to design, implement and monitor effective child well-being policies. However, mostly countries do not have good data on which to base their child well-being policies or a strong data infrastructure to monitor these policies. For the first time, children will be considered in OECD’s new guidelines on how to measure subjective well-being. This session calls for papers addressing different challenges and opportunities related to child well-being data and indicators. Challenges can be related, but not only, with data collection from children in general, including ethical and data protection issues; development of new child indicators; data collection specifically from more vulnerable children (e.g. children under 7-years-old, in disability, migrant background, not living with biological parent(s)) and development of objective/subjective indicators for these groups; child well-being data fragmentation and difficulties in their use. Opportunities can be related, but not only, with new ways to collect data from and about children; development and use of international, national and/or sub-national cross-sectoral child well-being monitoring systems and indicator sets; the accessibility and usability increase of child well-being data and indicators through data portals, dashboards etc. Theoretical, empirical and also discussion papers are welcome.