A guide to measuring children’s well-being

This guide is a supplement to a larger report, Backing the Future: why investing in children is good for us all, which is the culmination of a programme of research carried out by nef and Action for Children.

This guide explains how we can accurately measure well-being in children and young people. It looks specifically at the scope of subjective indicators (e.g., life satisfaction, optimism about the future) to complement objective indicators of well-being (e.g., child obesity, numeracy and literacy, household income) in informing us about how children experience their lives – from their own perspectives. It covers some of the practical approaches to measuring child well-being that have been implemented and it discusses some of the considerations that need to be made when designing a well-being measurement tool for children, which includes subjective indicators.