Jan Mason – författare

Drawing on the multinational qualitative study ‘Children’s Understandings of Well-being’ (CUWB), this unique edited collection offers practical insights into conducting fieldwork across diverse geographical, social and cultural contexts, using the same basic protocol.The book explores the practical, ethical and philosophical challenges the researchers faced, and the ways in which these issues were dealt with by the different research teams. Contributors provide rare insights into the diverse institutional requirements and professional practices highlighting the way research methods are embedded in contexts that are at one and the same time both local and global. With contributions from experts in child well-being research from Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, Germany, Romania, South Africa, Switzerland, Turkey, the UK and the US, the book provides valuable perspectives for researchers across a wide range of settings.

The book presented here describes an outstanding attempt, not only to include children’s views but to partner with children to develop the concept of well-being and to study the phenomenon as the children understand it. The authors do this by placing the concept of children’s well-being within the existing discourses on the topic and by developing their unique theoretical approach to the concept. Then, and based on what children told them, the authors identify different domains and dimensions of children’s well-being and touch upon its multifaceted nature. The book concludes with drawing research and policy implications from an integrated summary of the study’s findings and lists indicator concepts that present an alternative framework and conceptualisation of well-being from a child standpoint.