The Worldwide Outlook for Children: A Web Resource of Young People's Wellbeing, Rights, and Interests

The Worldwide Outlook for Children (WOC) is a web resource of information and indicators of young people’s wellbeing, rights, and interests. WOC is available to social scientists who seek to identify, understand consequences of, and explain sources of inequalities young people experience. WOC is a web resource designed for use by everyone, from scholars to policy makers to young people, and is available in multiple languages. Recent innovations in the Sociology of Childhood have focused attention on children as active agents with interests and perspectives worth knowing about. Widespread ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has led to a greater focus on children’s rights and on many aspects of their wellbeing. WOC demonstrates how social scientific evidence can sharpen our awareness about the variety of structural disadvantages children experience worldwide and the countries and regions in which multiple disadvantages and inequalities exist. Among different resources, WOC presents evidence of children’s physical health and survival, educational attainment and resources devoted to educational success, violence committed against young people, and children’s work experiences. As sociologists learn more about children’s legal and informal rights, interests and aspirations, psychological wellbeing, social interactions, choices, levels of resilience, and spiritual beliefs, we become aware of much more that we want to know about young people and the range of inequalities they experience from a global perspective. During this presentation, we will discuss methodological challenges and substantive gaps in global knowledge of children’s wellbeing, rights, and interests, and how we might move forward to develop more comprehensive and holistic understandings. We will consider how measurement, theoretical, and cross-cultural questions challenge sociology’s ability to grasp outlooks for young people worldwide.