What Children Think Is a Good Place: A Cross-Country Study on the Effects of Children's Perceptions of Neighborhood on Children's Multidimensional Subjective Well-Being

Background: Over the past two decades, interest in measuring and applying children’s subjective well-being to policy decisions has grown. The neighborhood that children live, play, and go to school has an immediate bearing on their daily experiences and how they perceive their lives. Several cross-national studies have documented the positive association between children’s perceptions of neighborhood quality and their overall subjective well-being. It remains unclear how neighborhood quality influences the other areas of children’s lives when multidimensional measures of subjective well-being are utilized. This study explores 1) the association between children’s perceived neighborhood quality and multidimensional subjective well-being and 2) the consistency of these relationships across 16 countries.

Methods: A secondary data analysis of the second wave of data collected from the International Survey of Children’s Well-Being (ISCWeB) was performed. Children’s multidimensional subjective well-being was measured by children’s evaluation of lives in eight life domains, including home, material things, interpersonal relationships, neighborhood, health, school, time management, and self. Children’s perceived neighborhood quality was measured by two indicators, children’s perception of their neighborhood play space and safety. Path analysis and multiple-group analysis were conducted to answer the research questions.

Results: Findings indicate that children’s perception of neighborhood quality – represented by neighborhood play space and safety – was positively associated with children’s multidimensional subjective well-being, but this relationship was not consistent across countries. Multiple-group analysis identified countries in which neighborhood quality had no significant effect on children’s multidimensional subjective well-being. Among countries with significant effects, the path coefficients were invariance across countries in multiple life domains.

Conclusions and Implications: The findings highlight the role of neighborhood quality in shaping children’s multidimensional subjective well-being and the need for policies to consider children’s perceptions to be effective. This study’s findings suggest future research on 1) identifying more neighborhood-level factors that are critical to children’s subjective well-being; 2) exploring country-level factors that explain the country variations in the relationship between perceived neighborhood quality and children’s multidimensional subjective well-being; and 3) expand data collection on children’s subjective well-being to more countries. Policies affecting children should aim to increase children’s participation in the neighborhood decision-making process and improve the accessibility of neighborhood place space and neighborhood safety because providing children a better living environment leads to a happier childhood.