Challenges and Opportunities In Turbulent Times Related to Child Well-Being Data and Indicators

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, most 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 are considered in OECD’s new guidelines on how to measure subjective well-being. This session calls for papers addressing different challenges and opportunities in current turbulent times 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, not living with biological parent(s), migrant background, living in areas affected by war) 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.