Population Review

Introduction

The papers included in this Special Collection originate from–or were inspired by–the 7th conference of the International Society for Child Indicators (ISCI) ‘Children of the Worlds: The Touch of Change. Research, Policy, and Practices,’ held on 27–29 August 2019 in Tartu, Estonia. International Society for Child Indicators (ISCI, established in 2005) incorporates senior researchers and professionals internationally who develop and support indicators to measure and monitor the well-being of children and apply the collected data to influence and formulate policies. ISCI holds biannual international conferences since 2007.

The ISCI conferences aim to gather researchers, practitioners, policy makers and child advocates from across the world to share and discuss the latest research on child indicators and their implications for policy and interventions. The current Special Collection presents examples of children’s well-being research from different angles, such as measurement of child poverty, a debate over applying the notion of child well-being in children’s rights law and research, and empirical evidence of children’s rights and well-being from adults’ and children’s perspectives. The ten articles included in the Collection capture analyses of children’s subjective well-being from Bangladesh, Estonia, France, Indonesia, Nigeria, Poland, and Russia. They are authored by different scholars (sociologists, psychologists, educational scientists, childhood and well-being scholars, faculty of law), but also by an advisor to the Chancellor of Justice of Estonia, UNICEF senior adviser, and head of the Analysis and Statistics Department at Estonian Ministry of Social Affairs.

The ISCI conferences carry ideas of children as a separate social group and a part of the society, also known in academic literature as a ‘new’ understanding of children and childhood. The emergence of a ‘new’ understanding of childhood as a social phenomenon, and of children being active social actors in their own right within a generational order, has given rise to a paradigmatic advancement in the field of reshaping studies in children and childhood, since its development in the mid-1980s (Qvortrup 1985; Qvortrup, Sgritta, and Wintersberger 1994; Alanen 1994). The paradigm rapidly gained popularity with the fresh view it contributed to the development of new theories regarding children and childhood (e.g., Corsaro 1997; James, Jenks, and Prout 1998; and others). [End Page 195]

The new approach differed significantly from the prior one, as it viewed a child not as a future adult but as an active social actor and a subject in the here and now. An international group of researchers studying social indicators of children’s well-being (Ben-Arieh et al. 2001) admitted that administrative data collected on children so far and the so-called simple counting of children (e.g., how many drop out of school, how many have a certain disease, etc.) is not enough to explain how children themselves think they are doing and to what extent their rights are secured. It became clear that the assessments of adults about children are not always adequate and correct. The assessments of children and adults cannot be the same because they are representatives of different generations and, as such, they fulfil different roles in the society as well as towards each other (e.g., Casas 2011; Casas et al. 2013; Gilman and Huebner 2000). If a child is considered as a subject, not an object, it should also be believed that the child has age-appropriate social competence and ability to provide subjective evaluations about different aspects of one’s life (Ben-Arieh 2005; Casas et al. 2013; Mason and Danby 2011).

This new viewpoint in the child well-being research is important in both policy formulation as well as for official statistics, because it can significantly alter the statistical picture. Moreover, new theoretical considerations about children and childhood pave the way for discussions about children’s rights (e.g., Carvalho 2008; Doek 2014; Mayall 2015; and others), and the normative framework of the understanding of a child’s well-being (Kosher and Ben-Arieh 2016). Internationally, the interest in data collected from children started with the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of...