Indicators and Indices of Child Well-being: A Brief History

The use of statistical indicators to monitor social trends dates at least to 1929 when the Committee on Recent Social Trends was established by President Hoover, and published Recent Social Trends in the United States in 1933 (Zill et al 1983). Statistical information provided the basis for the Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate schools in 1954, as well as other legal actions (Brim, 1975a). The field of indicators of child well-being has its origins, however, in the Social Indicators Movement of the 1960s which arose in a climate of rapid social change and a sense among social scientists and public officials in the Johnson Administration that government, with the use of social measurement and planning, should offer corrective responses to social problems (Aborn 1985). The then HEW issued, Toward a Social Report in 1969 which, along with other reports of the time, outlined strategies for maintaining data bases of indicators to track progress toward social goals and priorities (Aborn 1985; Zill et al 1983). Seminal works on social indicators were written in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and we can trace to these origins the different conceptual approaches to developing chil