Tanja Betz/Sabine Andresen
Child Well-Being – A concept’s potentials and limits. An introduction
Florian Eßer
“The Happiness That Never Returns” – Well-being from a historicalsystematic perspective
Current research on child well-being claims to have an understanding of childhood that differs from earlier perspectives in two ways: first of all, “well-being” is said to have replaced earlier notions of “well-becoming” and, second, approaches to child “welfare” have been critically reviewed and developed further. This paper deals with the assumed change from a historical-systematic perspective. It can be shown that, even at the beginning of the 20th century, discussions on child protection and welfare were already oriented towards the well-being of children. This concept of well-being was closely linked to the idea of a happy childhood, which is also a guiding principal for recent research on well-being. Then as now, the child was and is conceived of as a hybrid that could be referred to both in his or her presence and self-reference and as a developing being that still needs to acquire competences before becoming a social agent. On the basis of these findings, the linear change from “well-becoming” and “welfare” to “well-being” is questioned. If the originality of recent approaches to well-being is not derived from a simple dissociation from adult-centered notions of childhood, current research is challenged to substantiate its own programmatic in a different way. Therefore the paper ends with a plea for an approach to child well-being which is reflexive regarding individual, subjective concepts of childhood and which allows to relate these concepts to the concrete social and cultural contexts in which children move.
Keywords: Child Well-Being, Childhood, Child Welfare, Happiness, History
Susann Fegter
Spatial Configurations of a Good Childhood – On the potential of praxeological approaches to research on child well-being
Within child well-being research the spatial dimension of well-being has played a subordinate role. The paper deals with this dimension and examines the potential of a praxeological perspective in this context. In a first step, the perspective of the Childhood Studies on the constitutive relation between childhood and space is sketched, followed by an outline of the field of research on child well-being with a focus on current methodological challenges regarding both the research subject (well-being) and the exploration of its spatial dimension. In a third step, a praxeological approach is described as a possible answer to the challenges identified and, based on data provided by an ethnographic research project, it is then applied to a scene observed. This allows for some final considerations, summarizing on four levels how well-being and space can be related to one another and how research on child well-being would benefit from adopting such a perspective.
Keywords: Child Well-Being, Space, Childhood, Praxeology, After-School Care
Sabine Andresen/Ulrich Schneekloth
Well-Being and Justice. Conceptual perspectives and empirical findings of research on childhood as illustrated by the World Vision Children’s Study 2013
This paper discusses the concepts of child well-being and justice and their potential for childhood studies on the basis of the 3rd World Vision Children’s Study 2013. The World Vision Children’s study “Children in Germany 2013” is based on a multidimensional concept of child well-being and is closely linked to the international discourse. The authors present the conceptual and theoretical ideas, the methodological procedure and selected results. The third study is special in that it focuses on justice and the sense of justice of children aged 6 to 11. The aim is to explore the potential of this specific approach with regard to childhood theory and empirical research on childhood.
Keywords: Survey, Justice, Inequality, Capability Approach, Middle Childhood
Gerry Redmond/Jennifer Skattebol
Filling in the Details – Significant events and economic disadvantage among young people in Australia
Economic disadvantage is a strong predictor of social exclusion, disengagement at school, early school dropout and low educational attainment. This paper shows that experience of significant events – for example, moving home and school following parents’ separation; a sudden fall in family income; or illness and death in the family – can greatly exacerbate economically disadvantaged young people’s sense of exclusion and disengagement. Survey data are used to show that such negative events (often characterised by young people as ‘shocks’) are most likely to occur among economically disadvantaged families with children. In-depth interviews with young people are also used to explore young people’s construction of these events, which they often describe in terms of a cascade, with several shocks following each other in rapid succession, draining away their, and their families’, economic, social and emotional resources, and leaving them at risk of further exclusion. The paper concludes that policy needs to buffer young people better from the effects of these events, and so reduce their disengagement and exclusion.
Keywords: Children’s Perspectives, Poverty, Exclusion, Significant Events, Mixed Methods
Asher Ben-Arieh
Social Policy and the Changing Concept of Child Well-Being: The role of international studies and children as active participants
Social policy refers to the overall actions and services a society takes to ensure the well-being of its citizens. As such, children are at the forefront of social policy, and investing in them is both crucial for their current well-being and an investment toward the future. However, the concept of child well-being is changing. Scholars have termed this shift as one of moving from child-saving to child development or from child welfare to child well-being. This changing context, which in many ways is still developing, is complicating the effort to develop appropriate indicators and outcome measures of children’s quality of life and status and consequently it is complicating the evaluation of social policy and its contribution. This paper presents the changing context of children’s well-being, the major shifts that have occurred in the field, and their implications for evaluating social policy. It then goes on to discuss the potential of international comparisons in evaluating social policies and in particular the new role for children’s subjective reports on their well-being as a tool for evaluating social policy. In that regard, the paper presents the International Survey of Children’s Well-Being and concludes with a call for new policies that will adhere to the new concept of children’s well-being and serve to create a better life for children.
Keywords: Children Rights, Social Policy, Child Participation, Children’s Well-Being, Children’s Quality of Life
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Jochen Kade/Sigrid Nolda
1984/2009 – Education-biographical presences in the context of changes in context constellations
Educational biographies – thus it is assumed – are a sequence of educational configurations embedded in the course of life and differing depending on the diverse current circumstances. Against this background, the authors focus on the respective current social circumstances and living conditions out of which educational biographies are recounted. The main focus is on two educational configurations, 25 years apart, of one individual. Based on these, the discontinuous-continuous change of educational biographies is reconstructed. For a more detailed specification, processes of contextualization and re-contextualization related to contexts of mass media, of educational science and pedagogy, and of culture of the period between 1984 and 2009 are analyzed. These context constellations are what make biographical research an informative and revelatory resource for an educational-scientific diagnosis of times.
Keywords: Education Biography, Presences, Individuality, Contextualization, Zeitdiagnose
Christian Niemeyer
On Julius Langbehn (1851–1907), the voelkish movement and the wondrous image of the “Rembrandt German” in pedagogical historiography
No other rule of three of the discipline’s knowledge matrix is a newcomer to the field of pedagogical thinking as quickly accustomed to as that stating that the era of progressive education and the youth movement which started around 1900 followed that cultural criticism exercised especially by Friedrich Nietzsche and subsequently by Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn at the end of the 19th century. The listing of these three names under the cipher of a comparatively consensually (culture-critically) reasoning “triumvirate” (Oelkers) – a term already critically scrutinized by Oelkers several years ago – is rather surprising, the more so since it seems to presuppose the existence of two monolithic blocks, i. e. cultural criticism, on the one hand, linked to these three names, and progressive education and the youth movement, on the other, – a narrative that seems to speak of cause and effect without describing one or the other sufficiently and without exploring the relation of cause and effect adequately. In this context, the name of Julius Langbehn, in particular, attracts attention – which gives rise to a critical scrutiny of his surprisingly positive image in pedagogical historiography (even of the present) and in the historiography of the youth movement, in particular.
Keywords: Youth Movement, Educational Theory Favouring the Promotion of the Child’s Creativity, Critique of Contemporary Civilization, National Movement, Research about Reception
Habilitation treatises and dissertations in educational sciences in 2013