Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Children’s material well-being, and the levels of wealth and inequality in societies within which children live, are important factors in determining outcomes.  However, less is known about the extent to which these factors have an impact children’s subjective well-being, especially in an internationally comparative context and when children themselves provide data on their material well-being.

This study draws on data from the Children’s Worlds survey, an international study of child subjective well-being, to explore links between national level indicators of wealth and inequality (GDP and Gini coefficients), individual indicators of material well-being (the material resources children report having access to), and subjective well-being.  The survey covers 16 diverse countries covering the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa and South America, with samples of at least 3,000 per country, ages 8, 10 and 12.  Children were asked to report on their access to a list of 8 items and activities, and also provided self-assessments of their subjective well-being, globally and in relation to various life domains including their subjective assessments of their material well-being.

This paper will address two topics.  Firstly the material resources scale included in the Children’s Worlds survey will be assessed overall and in differing national contexts; and secondly the associations between access to material resources and subjective well-being will be examined.  Cross-national comparisons of the associations between material resources and subjective well-being will be made, and a multilevel model examining the effects of material resources at the individual, school, and country level will be presented.  Thus the paper will address the questions of how well the current indicators capture a construct of material well-being which is comparable across diverse countries; how this might be improved in future research; and what we can learn about the association between material well-being and subjective well-being for children living in very different national and cultural contexts.