Children’s and young people’s voices on their wellbeing

This report contains the findings from a rapid literature search on children and young people’s understanding of their own wellbeing and what they think influences it. Listening to children voice their own views is important for a number of reasons. They provide one of the necessary foundations to building relevant and appropriate (survey) measures of wellbeing for these age groups, an aim of governmental working groups. Also, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child recommends that children’s views need to be given due weight in matters that affect them
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In order to find studies containing children’s voices, the search focused on finding published materials using one of two types of data collection:

•  data collected using qualitative methods covering a broad range of techniquescommonly used with children and young people
•  data collected through open-ended questions in surveys.

Children and young people from ages eight to 18 were the focus, and UK studies were of particular interest.