Indicators and Indices of Children's Well-being: towards a more policy-oriented perspective.

This article focuses on the potential and actual use of child social indicators and indices in the policy-making process. It opens with a brief overview of the child indicators field and its current development and trends. A discussion of these new developments follows, with special emphasis on the consequences of the changing field to the potential role of child social indicators in the policy-making process. The third section focuses on existing knowledge on indicators of children's well-being and the information needed to enhance their policy impact. The article then turns to discuss two major efforts to measure and monitor children's well-being: the UNICEF child well-being index and the Foundation for Child Development (FCD) child well-being index. As both cases were mainly data driven, the paper uses them as case studies assessing the potential for using existing indicators of children's well-being in the policy process. The paper if finalized with discussing the two indices within a context of a future oriented research and indicators development agenda for anyone who want to enhance the policy impact of indicators and indices of children well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]