A weighted multidimensional index of child well-being which incorporates children’s individual perceptions

It has been a decade since a landmark piece of work on child well-being measurement based on a summary index was developed in the United States, the Index of Child and Youth Well-Being. Several research studies, both in the U.S. and Europe, followed on from this work. However, improvements in the methodologies used by researchers are still required, namely with regard to incorporating children’s own perspectives of their well-being, as well as involving them in the measurement process. In the present paper, a composite index is proposed in order to try overcoming three of the main methodological limitations of current studies: the short account for children’s perceptions on their own well-being, the use of aggregated data, and the use of uniform and other weighting schemes that do not translate the real weights of individual indicators.