Concepts, measures and policy problems: The case study of child wellbeing measurement in the UK between 2014-2024

The effective measurement of child wellbeing has acquired an increasingly prominent place in national and international policy discourses. Yet it remains a conceptually blurry term, characterised by a significant degree of normative disagreement and ‘entanglement’. Difficulties of conceptual clarity are compounded by the need to usefully integrate measurement practices into complex policy landscapes. This paper offers an empirical contribution to this challenge, drawing upon the case study of UK child wellbeing measurement and monitoring practices. Specifically, it applies an adapted version of Bacchi’s What’s the problem represented to be (WPR) approach to analyse how the overall concept of child wellbeing is divided into ‘sub-domains’ in documents published by the Office for National Statistics and the UK government between 2014 and 2024. Analysis identifies two key conceptual shortcomings. First, the criteria for deciding appropriate ‘domains’ of child wellbeing do not explicitly engage with the distinct needs and experiences of children. Second, the process of selecting and organising domains offers no analytical distinction between child-centred outcomes and the broader determinants of child wellbeing. These result in a lack of conceptual precision with regards to connecting the ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ of measurement, which permeates through the documents under consideration. The paper highlights the need for a more systematic and explicitly child-centred approach to conceptualising and articulating the types of outcomes that measurement infrastructure and policy are aiming for, which it considers a necessary step in addressing these shortcomings.