How do concepts and measures of children’s well-being outcomes align with perspectives of care-experienced children? A scoping review

Background: Children in alternative care score consistently lower on measures of well-being outcomes. However, research on children’s well-being outcomes and the fulfilment of their human rights have overlooked their experiences. Therefore, this scoping review aims to understand how children’s well-being outcomes are conceptualised, operationalised and measured – and compare these with consultations with care-experienced children from the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child Day of General Discussion (DGD) 2021. We apply intersectionality to demonstrate that focusing on care-experienced children benefits children’s well-being outcomes more broadly.

Methods: We used a scoping review adhering to the PRISMA-Scoping framework. We searched for peer-reviewed articles on children’s well-being outcomes from 2009-2023 from EBSCO, PubMed, and Web of Science worldwide. Out of 6,804 articles, 25 were reviewed.

Results: We found inconsistencies in the operationalised concept measures of well-being outcomes regarding the data collected, tools used, and their processes of standardisation. Key findings included the limited mention of domains of identity, inclusion, quality services, safety, support and trust, as central to the more holistic understandings of well-being that care-experienced children raised in consultations in the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child DGD 2021.

Implications: We suggest a rights-based approach to well-being outcomes that is based on the full spectrum of children’s human rights. By involving children in the design of well-being outcomes, measures are more likely to reflect the intersecting social realities in which they live to ensure that the inequalities in well-being outcomes of care-experienced children form part of the research agenda.