How Children See Well-Being, Poverty, and Justice: The Focus of the Third World Vision Child Study

Abstract

The World Vision Child Studies have just one basic philosophy: to give a voice to children in Germany. These studies view children as the experts on the world they live in: on their feelings, opinions, and experiences. The First World Vision Child Study in 2007 presented and substantiated this theoretical and methodological approach in some detail. One of the findings emphasized in 2007 has had a notable impact both in Germany and abroad: the notable gaps the study revealed in what we know about middle childhood, that is, children between the ages of 6 and 11 years. What is the state of international childhood studies in 2013 and how does the Third World Vision Child Study relate to this research? These are the questions we want to address in this introductory chapter. We shall start by positioning our approach within national and international research on child well-being. Although we have been looking at child well-being continuously ever since our First Study, there have been further developments in this field since the Second Study in 2010. These are presented in Sect. 1.2 and continue the theoretical discussion to be found in the Second Study. A further important topic is the situation of children living in poverty. The Third World Vision Child Study also broadens the range of the two previous studies and examines the children's sense of justice. What children require for a good and thereby a just life is certainly something they frequently think about themselves. In our previous studies, we noticed that whenever we asked children about their values or to tell us what a good life means for children regardless of where they are growing up, their answers always addressed the core of the debates to be found in justice theory. Children want to have their say here, and they have something to say. In the Third Study, we explicitly address the topic of justice and report on the children's sense of justice and how they judge injustice and inequality. This opens up a new field of research in both national and international childhood studies. Section 1.5 reports on how we position our study within interdisciplinary research on justice and the justice discussion that is frequently philosophical in nature. In the final Sect. 1.6, we present some comments on our methodological approach. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)