AFR News: Child Trends- The Critical Need for Positive Indicators of Child Development

Friday, October 5, 2012

Child Trends- The Critical Need for Positive Indicators of Child Development

October 5, 2012

The Critical Need for Positive Indicators of Child Development

Human development includes positive and negative developmental processes. Too often, researchers have focused on negative developmental behaviors alone, which provide an incomplete picture of factors that ultimately combine to affect child outcomes. There is a critical need to monitor positive development among children and youth as well.

As part of its Flourishing Children Project, Child Trends has added new resources on Positive Indicators of child development to its website: www.childtrends.org/positiveindicators. Child Trends has developed rigorous national indicators of flourishing among children and youth for inclusion in national surveys, research studies, and program evaluations.

The positive indicators web section features:

The recording and slides from the July 19, 2012 webinar, Measuring Flourishing Among Youth.
Detailed information on 19 constructs of flourishing, including definitions, scales, and psychometric properties of survey items developed as part of this project.
Information about cognitive interviews with adolescents and parents, conducted as part of the item development process.
Information about our pilot survey of a nationally representative sample of adolescents and their parents, including a data access form for researchers interested in conducting secondary analyses on the dataset.
Publications featuring a conceptual framework and discussion of work to date and methodological issues related to positive indicators.
And many more resources!

Child Trends is grateful to the John Templeton Foundation for their generous support. For more information on this work, contact Laura Lippman (llippman@childtrends.org), Kristin Moore (kmoore@childtrends.org), or Kristen Darling-Churchill (kchurchill@childtrends.org).

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A 50-State Tour of Child Well-Being: A Race to the Bottom?

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