Children's Concepts of Well-being : Challenges in International Comparative Qualitative Research

This book presents a range of innovative analytical frameworks that can be used to approach the complexities of children’s understandings and experiences of well-being in a locally oriented, context-sensitive and multi-nationally comparative way. It addresses the challenges of undertaking research on children’s understandings of well-being from a multi-national qualitative perspective. Chapters in the book present results that show how children from various places all over the world conceptualize and experience well-being as well as how this is linked local, regional and national social, political and cultural contexts. 

Christine Hunner-Kreisel is working at the University of Vechta as a Professor in the Institute of Social Work, Education Science and Science of Sports, in the field of Transculturality and Gender. Her main research interests are on childhood and youth with a focus on family and institutional processes in upbringing and education. She researches on the subject of well-being of children and youth with reference to questions of social inequalities. She has expertise in qualitative research methods.

Christine Hunner-Kreisel has worked in several national and international projects on the subjects of Islamic Education, Education in a globalized world, on youth and migration, on childhood and family and migrational processes. Actually she is working in an international, qualitative project on the well-being of children and is leading coordinator of the together with Dr. Susann Fegter (TU-Berlin/Germany) and Dr. Tobia Fattore (Macquarie University/Australia). Christine Hunner-Kreisel has organized several international conferences on the subject of Growing up and Education in Muslim lifeworlds, and another international conference on the subject of childhood and migration: gendered and generational perspectives (financed by the German Research Foundation/DFG). She is editor-in-chief for the Child Indicator Research Journal together with Asher Ben Arieh and Bong Joo Lee.

Tobia Fattore' is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Macquarie University. His empirical research is in the broad areas of the sociology of childhood and sociology of work. He is currently working on several projects in these areas. This includes a sociological examination of children's well-being, that analyses children's understandings and sense of well-being and how this reflects processes of modernisation. With Jan Mason, he has recently published Children’s Understandings of Well-being: Towards a Child Standpoint (Springer) which provides a comprehensive theory of child well-being using unique empirical data. He has undertaken a study of children's work in developed economies that shows how transformations in the world of work have created different opportunities for children for social integration.

He is currently a coordinating lead researcher on the multi-national study Children's Understandings of Well-being - Global and Local Contexts' which involves a qualitative investigation into how children experience well-being from a comparative and global perspective, to explore the relative importance of local, regional and national contexts for children's well-being.

Susann Fegter is a Professor for Historical and General Educational Sciences at the Technische Universität Berlin. Her current empirical research is located in the broad area of the social contexts and processes of growing up of children and youth, with a specific focus on qualitative methodology, discourse analysis, gender and technology. Susann Fegter has long years of experiences in managing and leading qualitative research projects on childhoods. She has done a 3-year´s ethnography on urban childhoods in Frankfurt/Main and was part of the research team of World Vision Children’s Studies “Children in Germany” 2010 and 2013. Currently she is the scientific leader of a DFG-project on gendered professions in early childhood education (NeO) and is doing a pilot study in Berlin to test participatory research instruments for the multinational qualitative study on “Children´s understanding of well-being” (CUWB). Susann Fegter is very visible in international publications and on international conferences, including organizing an international conference in 2015 in Berlin funded by the DFG. Susann Fegter is Vice-Director for internationalization and research at the School of Education at the TU Berlin (SETUB) and speaker of the graduate school DiGiTal, which is a cooperative project of all universities in Berlin to support gender equalities in academic careers.