Children’s welfare indicators have been adopted to be assessment criteria to inspect a nation’s children welfare. The results inform what the children’s welfare looks like and how the welfare can be provided in the future. However, the children’s welfare indicators and their definitions exists variations among the OECD countries and Taiwan. The domestic investigations and statistics surveys in Taiwan conducted by various departments, including the Child Agency Bureau, the Health Bureau, the Immigration Agency, Department of Education, etc. These surveys reveal their own particular interests and children’s welfare may not be the core issues. Therefore the Taiwanese government needs to construct the children’s welfare indicators which can be comparable with the international data.

The aims of this study are to construct children’s welfare indicators based on the publication ‘Doing Better for Children’ by OECD 2009 in order to compare the children’s welfare data in Taiwan with the international one. We also construct the suitable indicators which reflect the local society characteristics.

      Children’s welfare indicators have been adopted to be assessment criteria to inspect a nation’s children welfare. The results inform what the children’s welfare looks like and how the welfare can be provided in the future. However, the children’s welfare indicators and their definitions exists variations among the OECD countries and Taiwan. The domestic investigations and statistics surveys in Taiwan conducted by various departments, including the Child Agency Bureau, the Health Bureau, the Immigration Agency, Department of Education, etc. These surveys reveal their own particular interests and children’s welfare may not be the core issues. Therefore the Taiwanese government needs to construct the children’s welfare indicators which can be comparable with the international data.

      The aims of this study are to construct children’s welfare indicators based on the publication ‘Doing Better for Children’ by OECD 2009 in order to compare the children’s welfare data in Taiwan with the international one. We also construct the suitable indicators which reflect the local society characteristics.

       The policy-focussed measures of child well-being in OECD countries include six dimensions: material well-being, housing and environment, education, health and safety, risk behaviours, and quality of school life. We kept the above indicators in order to compare the Taiwanese data with the OECD countries. Two other indicators – family well-being and social participation are also included because they reflect the children’s welfare characteristics in Taiwan. Eight indicators and 31 sub-indicators are constructed in this study. The indicator ‘family well-being’ is emphasized because children have strong connections with their family. Family has been a key concept in our welfare policy. Subsides and allowances for young children are designed under the condition of the legal marriage status. ‘Family well-being’ includes three sub-categories: family structure and marriage status, child care, and children who are cared out of home. ‘Social participant’ includes two sub-categories: teenagers who participated in labour force, and teenagers who participated in volunteer social services. We add two more sub-categories in ‘quality of school life’, which includes the workforce of school social workers, and truancy rates. Two subcategories ‘child abuse’ and ‘children’s death rates by accident’ are included in the category ‘health and safety’. Particularly motorcycles are commonly used for Taiwanese parents to drive their children to schools. The children’s welfare indicators we constructed are based on the OECD report and are modified to present the social characteristics in Taiwan.

 

Keywords: child indicator, child well-being, Taiwan