Our Lives, Our Care: Looked after children’s views on their well-being in 2017

In 2017, we published our fi rst report on the subjective well-being of children who were looked after (Selwyn & Briheim-Crookall, 2017). That report contained analyses of the responses of 611 children and young people who had completed the ‘Your Life, Your Care’ survey in 2016. It examined children’s responses to survey questions that asked about their subjective well-being and different areas of their lives – their relationships, rights, resilience, and recovery. Here we present fi ndings from 2017, where 2,263 looked after children and young people from 16 local authorities completed the same survey.

There is ongoing debate about the concept of wellbeing and how to measure it. Historically, there has been a dichotomy between subjective well-being and objective well-being. Objective measures of wellbeing involve the use of standardised questionnaires, quality of life indicators or factual measures (e.g. the percentage of children with 5 GCSEs). In contrast, subjective well-being focuses on how a person feels, thinks, and how they experience their life. The notion that well-being can be defi ned by just one measure has been challenged from many different quarters (e.g. Ryff, 1989; Fattore et al., 2012). Instead, adult and child well-being are now viewed holistically and understood to be where a person is thriving across multiple domains of life (Adler & Seligman, 2016).

The development of the surveys was infl uenced theoretically by Seligman’s work on subjective wellbeing and his concept of fl ourishing: the areas of life that contribute to an adult or child feeling good and functioning effectively. Research has found that fl ourishing is related to good mental health and well-being (Huppert & So, 2013). Children who are looked after should be enabled to fl ourish in care. We also took a children’s rights perspective believing that to understand subjective well-being we needed to understand the meaning children gave to their own lives and solicit their opinions, attitudes and perceptions on what mattered to them. Therefore, we worked with 140 looked after children and young people in focus groups asking, ‘What makes a good life?’ In addition, literature reviews of looked after young people’s views on their care experiences were completed and an expert professional group also contributed (see Selwyn et al., 2015 and Wood & Selwyn, 2017 for information on survey development).