The Center on Children and Families held a conference to discuss several issues related to the construction and use of the Index of Child Well-Being (CWI) developed by Ken Land of Duke University with support from the Foundation for Child Development.

The CWI is an evidence-based composite measure of trends over time in the quality of life or well-being of America's children. It comprises 28 key indicators, based on annual time series data, and is organized into seven domains of well-being. The domains include Family Economic Well-Being, Health, Safety/Behavioral Concerns, Educational Attainment, Community Connectedness, Social Relationships, and Emotional/Spiritual Well-Being. The CWI is a composite index, an equally-weighted average of these seven domains that provides a sense of the overall direction of annual changes in child well-being as compared with the base year (1975).

At the conference, we discussed several methodological and substantive issues underlying the construction and use of the CWI. We asked four experts to prepare background papers to lead the discussion of these issues. The papers are available below.

Read the transcript (PDF - 520 KB)
Read the summary (PDF - 40 KB)

Read the papers:
Don Hernandez, "Measuring Social Disparities: Ethnic, Racial, SES, and Immigrant Status" (PDF - 188 KB)
Bill O'Hare, "State-Level Indicators" (PDF - 60 KB)
Nick Zill, "Using Weights to Express the Relative Importance of Specific Domains in the Overall Index Score" (PDF - 83 KB)
Brett Brown, "Does the CWI Measure Representative Domains of Child Well-Being?" (PDF - 30 KB)

See the presentations:
Brett Brown power point (PDF - 55 KB)
Don Hernandez power point (PDF - 69 KB)