Measuring and Monitoring Children’sWell-Being: The Policy Process

Recent years have brought new and growing attention to the field of measuring and monitoring children’s well-being (Ben-Arieh and Goerge, 2001), partly as a result of movement toward accountability-based public policy that requires increasing amounts of information to provide more accurate measures of the conditions children face and the outcomes various programs achieve. At the same time, the rapid changes in family life have prompted an increased demand from child development professionals, social scientists, and the public for a clearer picture of children’s well-being (Andrews and Ben-Arieh, 1999; Hauser et al., 1997; Lee, 1997).