Re-defining subjective well-being with Looked-After Children in Scotland

Introduction In Scotland, there are a number of measures used to collect how well the country ‘performs’ in relation to children and young people. The Scottish Government publishes its own performance indicators with the... [ view full abstract ]

Introduction
In Scotland, there are a number of measures used to collect how well the country ‘performs’ in relation to children and young people. The Scottish Government publishes its own performance indicators with the aim of making “Scotland to be the best place in the world for children to grow up in”. A number of national surveys are used to support this framework, but all are aimed at the general child and adolescent population. When it comes to the outcomes of Looked-After Children, data is only available through annual statistics provided by Local Authorities through their management information. This focuses on educational grades and additional educational needs, placement types and moves, and child protection registrations. This ‘official statistics’ approach to capturing the complex and meaningful lives of Looked-After Children is questionable (Holligan et al. 2014).

Objectives
Due to the lack of data available to examining the well-being of Looked-After Children it was proposed that a new subjective well-being survey be developed. The survey itself would be designed with the input of children and young people with care experience. It is the aim of this paper to discuss the process of developing such a survey, and significantly, the young people’s views as to how to approach the domains of well-being for young people who were in care, or on the ‘cusp’ of care.

Methodology
The research used four focus groups with young people with care experience to discuss the desirability and relevancy of specific survey questions about well-being. This follows the approach of other subjective well-being surveys that include children and young people in some aspect of survey design or reflection, and children’s engagement with the research process itself (Navarro et al. 2015, Casas et al. 2013, Hanson et al. 2016).

The 19 young people who participated in the research were aged between fourteen and twenty-three. The researcher engaged with four different organisations to include young people with different care pathways. Those who agreed to take part did so via one residential school, one secure unit and two different community based charities. The role of the focus groups in this research were to debate and refine questions previously used by the Children’s Society in the Good Childhood reports.

Findings
The broad domains used within Scottish Policy in relation to children and young peoples’ outcomes were presented to the groups. The overarching themes of Safety, Healthy, Achieving, Nurtured, Active, Responsible, Respected and Included as set out in the Children and Young Peoples (Scotland) Act 2014 were not objected to. However, specific survey questions were debated considerably. Some questions were analysed as to how ‘well’ they captured children and young people’s lives in general, for example, as to whether ‘often feeling tired’ was a reflection on smoking too much cannabis or working too hard. Others were specifically refined in order to address the needs of the Looked-After community such as, would being responsible in terms of babysitting a younger sibling actually be raising some fundamental child protection concerns?

Conclusion
This paper will add to the debate about using subjective well-being measures with children and young people, as well as the role they should play in designing questions themselves – how far can they be included in the development of such specific measures. The paper will also highlight some of the key issues that they raised about orientating a well-being survey specifically in relation to Looked-After children.