At the end of 1994, The National Council for the Child (NCC) in Israel initiated a new international endeavor. Discussions with a group of researchers from Europe, the United States, and Israel led to a consensus regarding the need for new and creative methods for measuring the state of children. Within this field it was agreed that efforts to develop such measures should focus on those aspects of children's lives that are beyond survival. These discussions led to the first international workshop, "Measuring and Monitoring the State of Children: Beyond Survival," that was held in January 1996 in Jerusalem. This international gathering of some 35 experts from 20 countries later developed into a three-year international project, reconvening for two additional workshops in Campobasso, Italy and South Carolina, U.S.A.

The Rationale for the Project

The decision to start the international project was based on the vast experience and knowledge of the first meeting participants and on the following assumptions:

• It is a worthwhile effort to measure and monitor the state of children.
• The field of children's well-being indicators is going through four major shifts: from survival to beyond survival (e.g. development, protection, provision and participation), from negative to positive, from traditional domains to new domains, and from focusing on the preparation for adulthood (well-becoming) to the present lives (well-being) of children.
• Existing measurements and indicators are focused on survival and negative behaviors and are inadequate for measuring children's well-being, especially in industrialized countries.
• Composing a new set of indicators is a complex and imaginative task. It is culturally contingent and would need to draw upon a wide variety of expertise, disciplines and cultures.

Who We Are and Where We Come From

The project members included some 80 experts from a variety of disciplines (social work, sociology, pediatrics, psychology, law, statistics, and more) from 28 different countries. Participants came from NGOs, universities, research centers, bureaus of census, government ministries and institutions, international organizations, and foundations.

How we worked

The project was guided and governed by a standing committee composed of all eleven co-sponsors. The Israeli National Council for the Child (NCC) coordinated the project. The project participants met three times, every 18 months, in Jerusalem, Israel; Campobasso, Italy; and Charleston, S.C., U.S.A. Between meetings, the participants worked in six working groups; each of them coordinated by one or two people. The working groups prepared the meetings and reported to the whole group on those occasions.

Goals of the Project

1. To reexamine "old" measurements and indicators of children's well-being and compose a new set of them that will:
• Use the child as a unit of observation.
• Accept the concepts of children's rights and childhood as a stage in itself.
• Be based on a variety of sources of information.
• Include positive indicators.
• Be policy oriented.
2. To suggest and invent ways and methods to use children's well-being indicators to promote the well being of children.
3. To prepare a work plan for disseminating our work and using it for conducting multi-national studies in an international context on the well-being of children.

What we have achieved

Following the three international meetings and the work carried out in the six working groups between meetings the following results were achieved:

1. All the papers that were presented in our first meeting in Jerusalem (25 papers) were published in a special Eurosocial report (No. 62). This volume of papers presents the rationale and basis of our project and the thoughts that guided us through our work.
2. A list of guidelines on how to compose and use children's well-being indicators in order to promote the well-being of children has been compiled. This list is based on five case studies on the use of indicators to influence policy (from France, Israel, Ireland, South Africa, and the U.S.A) and the discussions that were held both in one of the working groups and in the three plenary workshops.
3. The group has decided to avoid the minefield of suggesting a single theoretical framework for children's well-being. The strong desire for more practical work as well as the understanding that the theoretical definition of children's well-being is heavily culturally contingent was the basis for that decision. The solution the project adopted was to continue with a modified set of the five domains of children's well-being with which we had become familiar. A clear understanding was reached that this is not a definitive categorization and that for some purposes these are not the only or most important ones.

The five domains were, however, defined and theoretically supported by the working groups and then by the whole group. The domains we chose are: children's economic resources and contribution, children's personal life skills, children's civil life skills, children's safety and health status, and children's activity. An effort has been made to fit those five domains within a flexible conceptual framework in order to better understand and highlight them and the indicators we chose to measure and monitor children's well-being. A number of alternative frameworks were suggested and at least one of them, the "Snapshots of Childhood," was recognized as having a good potential for that task.

4. A list of some 50 indicators in all five domains was agreed upon. All the indicators adhered to the principals and guidelines for indicators the project has agreed upon and all are theoretically based. A description on how it could be measured or whether there are any existing data sources accompanies each suggested indicator.
5. A number of articles and publications were generated from the project. Those articles appeared in various newsletters, were presented in a number of conferences and were published in a number of highly respected academic journals.
6. A book summarizing the project work and its contributions was authored by a small group of the project members. The book was published in March 2001 by the Kluwer Academic Press (for details please see: http://www.wkap.nl/book.htm/0-7923-6789-8).

© 2007 Chapin Hall Center for Children.