Haridhan Goswami

Erratum to: The Current Evidence Base and Future Needs in Improving Children’s Well-Being Across Europe: is There a Case for a Comparative Longitudinal Survey? (Child Indicators Research, (2016), 9, 2, (371-388), 10.1007/s12187-015-9323-5)

There has been a growing interest among academics, policy makers and practitioners in the subjective well-being of children and young people (CYP). The recognition of CYP’s rights to having a good childhood and good future life chances, coupled with the injunction from the New Sociology of Childhood to consult with CYP as active agents have also resulted in an increasing interest in the use of well-being as a key concept in policy programmes in many countries. In recent years, child well-being has become a priority for the European political agenda. However, the main challenge for the European Union (EU) is to develop the best policies and approaches to effectively improve the well-being of children and young people using the most robust and suitable sources of data. This article identifies research gaps on children and young people’s subjective well-being and discusses the policy relevance of longitudinal survey in the context of the EU strategy for CYP. It is argued that a longitudinal survey would fulfil research gaps and provide invaluable data for the European Union and its member states for monitoring and evaluation of existing policies on children and young people’s well-being and developing future polices supported by robust data.

Notions of Well-Being, the State of Child Well-Being Research and the MYWeB Project

There has been a growing interest among academics, policy makers and practitioners in the subjective well-being of children and young people (CYP). The recognition of CYP’s rights to having a good childhood and good future life chances, coupled with the injunction from the New Sociology of Childhood to consult with CYP as active agents have resulted in an increasing number of studies on children and young people’s well-being at national and international levels. However, the design, content, and modes of data collection used in these surveys are influenced by the question of the extent to which the researchers view children and young people as similar or different to adults and which participatory models they are undertaking for the young people in the study. However, the design, content, and modes of data collection used in these surveys are influenced by a number of factors including conceptual underpinning of well-being, its measurement and participatory model(s) used by the researchers for children in those surveys. This chapter reviews these aspects before describing the structure of this book with summaries of each subsequent chapter.

With a View Towards the Future: Working Towards an Accelerated European Cohort Survey

The book has so far exposed the policy needs and benefits, as well as the challenges, of implementing a cross-national longitudinal survey on children and young people’s well-being. This concluding chapter focuses on how the MYWeB project came to recommend a national accelerated survey design with a view to suggest a way forwards for a pan-European longitudinal study. It describes how different potential methodologies were evaluated in relation to scientific and policy needs as well as technical and financial feasibility. It concludes by highlighting the challenges involved in taking forward a European Longitudinal Survey of Children and Young People (ELSCYP) using an accelerated cohort design.

Challenges in Conducting a New Longitudinal Study on Children and Young People Well-Being in the European Union

Longitudinal studies have a number of challenges in terms of data collection and analysis including sample attrition, panel conditioning, coverage error, time and cost. In addition, variability exists among European nations as to the availability and coverage of sampling frames, laws and regulations that restrict aspects of survey practice, availability and capacity of survey research organisations, cultural and behavioural norms, language(s) spoken, geographical dispersal of the study populations. Furthermore, research involving children and young people requires ethical considerations including how the children and young people can and should be involved in a study with reference to the degree of control and participation that they have.

Everyday Forms of Discrimination Experienced by the Minority: An Exploratory Study in a Village in Bangladesh

Contrary to the ongoing major researches on institutional discrimination in Bangladesh, in general, and individual level discrimination focusing physically salient group(s) in the US, in particular, this exploratory study analyzed various patterns of discrimination that the members of a physically nonsalient minority in Bangladesh experience in their everyday lives through interaction with the majority. The study also examined whether there was any variation among the participants in terms of receiving discrimination. Collecting data by using a semi-structured interview from 40 randomly selected religious minority household heads from a village in Bangladesh, the study identified the following discriminatory patterns: (i) criticizing rituals and practices, (ii) verbal harassment, (iii) offering poor services, (iv) exploitation of labor and money, (v) threats, (vi) physical attack, (vii) creating obstacles in performing festivals and (viii) land dispossession. This study found that participants from the lower socio-economic status (SES) were more prone to receiving discrimination than those from the upper SES. The most unique patterns of discrimination experienced by the participants were criticizing rituals and practices, exploitation of labor and money, threatening, creating obstacles in performing festivals and land dispossession. In terms of the effect of each pattern on the victims, land grabbing was found to be the most dreadful pattern of discrimination. The participants were victimized more in the environment surrounded by known members of the majority. Parallel to some other studies, the physically nonsalient participants of the present study were found to experience the discriminatory patterns of verbal harassment, offering poor services and physical attack.