Child well-being [citation] : a systematic review of the literature

A systematic review the child well-being literature in English was conducted with searches in five databases to assess the current state of child well-being research and answer the following questions: (1) How is child well-being defined? (2) What are the domains of child well-being? (3) What are the indicators of child well-being? and (4) How is child well-being measured? This review updates and expands a previous review of the child well-being literature spanning 1974–1992. Results indicate that well-being is a commonly used but inconsistently defined term frequently included in the study of child development. There are five distinct domains of child well-being: physical, psychological, cognitive,social, and economic. Positive indicators are used more often in the physical, cognitive,social, and economic domains, while more negative or deficit indicators are used in the psychological domain. There is little agreement in the research literature on how to best measure child well-being.