Most of us are not naïve enough to believe that giving our children more toys will make them happier.
Neither are we likely to say that children will be happier and more fulfilled if they spend time in front of screens as opposed to being outside, playing and exercising. And this is what many of us tell researchers. Yet many families in the UK have a surfeit of toys and watch a lot of TV.
This begs the question, how do we research well-being? Simply asking children is unlikely to reveal the full picture.
A key challenge of the research for UNICEF UK was to understand how the complex and potentially abstract social phenomena of well-being, inequality and materialism are experienced in the everyday lives of children. The complexity came not only in the terms themselves (for which working definitions are hard to create), but also in how people are likely to answer them.
In order to answer these questions we had to rely on an observational method – ethnography. Ethnography places the experience of children’s everyday lives at the core of the approach, observing time spent at home, with siblings, or out with friends.
By conducting the research in different countries we immediately saw the impact of how different family structures affected children and the manner in which children respond. Having both parents at home from an early age in Sweden brought the notion of equality within the home; the role that Spanish mothers play in looking after their children gave children the safety net to move with confidence into the world; and the more time pressured interactions that UK parents had with children left children wayward to choose their own activities.
One of the clearest disjunctures across the three countries was the difference in the amount of one-on-one time parents spent interacting with their children, how this was substituted when there was a lack of interaction, and what this meant for ‘childhood’.
In Spain, childhood was viewed as a joyful time in which the role of children was mainly to learn, supported by a willing extended family. In Sweden, childhood was preparation for becoming a responsible adult, where children are expected to play an active role in the running of the household. In the UK, we are struggling to find time for childhood. Neither children nor parents could tell us these findings; these are things we observed ourselves.
The aim of this study was to understand why other countries have better levels of child well-being than the UK. We often learn most about ourselves through comparisons with others, and comparing the UK to Sweden (which came top overall for child well-being in UNICEF’s Report Card 7) and Spain (which came second for subjective well-being) offers valuable lessons about how UK culture affects child well-being.
Methodologically, this cultural comparison allowed us two forms of analysis; emic (understanding well-being from within a culture or society) and etic (the ability to challenge a culture by placing it next to a different one). This anthropological analysis structure gave us a rounded model for a UK ‘social ecology’, and then two comparator models from Sweden and Spain.
Using an ethnographic approach allowed us to understand inequality, materialism and well-being in the context of the everyday lives of children and families. Through opening our eyes and spending time in people’s homes, we have helped uncover new insights into the well-being paradigm, pointing to ways in which the UK can improve the lives of children.
Oli Sweets is Research Manager at Ipsos MORI