Customer Reviews

Measuring and Monitoring Children's Well-Being (Social Indicators Research Series)

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This book is the product of international work since 1994 among close to 80 professionals from 27 countries in order to re-define and bring consensus to the issue of measuring and monitoring the status of children in our societies.
For many years many countries have gathered information and statistics about their children, but mostly in the area of basic needs and survival. This book and the international project is going beyond and looking at indicators to measure and monitor the well-being of our children. A task not easy to come about, but important, because it will provide important information, knowledge, tools for better planning and make monitoring more possible, when you have hard facts to compare with.
This book has nine chapters: Rationale for measuring child well- being, existing efforts around the world, basic guidelines, five new domains, indicators, how to measure, the community level, making of policy and summary with an agenda for future efforts in this field.
The message of the book is the importance of measurements of child well-being finding indicators that you will be able to monitor over time both improvements and change. The new approach can be described as looking at well-being instead of just survival, from negative aspects to positive aspects of child life, from well-becoming to well-being and from traditonal to new domains. The five new domains the authors propose are in childrens activities, childrens economic resources and contribution, civic life skills, personal life skills, and safety and physical status with 49 indicators.
This is an easy-to-read book with good information for professionals trying to find ways to measure and monitor well-being in todays children and adolescents.

Professor Joav Merrick, MD
Medical director, Division for Mental Retardation, Box 1260, IL-91012 Jerusalem, Israel. E-mail: jmerrick@aquanet.co.il