摘要: The European Cohort Development Project (ECDP) is financed from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme to create specific models for a European Research Infrastructure that will provide, over the next 25 years, comparative longitudinal survey data on child and young adult well-being. The infrastructure developed by ECDP will subsequently coordinate the first Europe wide cohort survey, named EuroCohort. This will be achieved through the following three objectives: (a) building support from key political policymakers with a brief which covers child well-being as well as national funding agencies tasked with infrastructural spending on science and survey data collection; (b) developing a scientifically excellent research design; (c) establishing a robust operation al framework that will ensure the logistic integrity of EuroCohort. The aim of one section of the project is to set up a Children and Young People’s Advisory Groups (CYPAG) and to identify, through focus groups, a children’s perspective on well-being, examine the meaning of the word ‘well-being’, as well as gather information of their understanding of ethical issues in longitudinal research on child well-being. Three focus group were conducted with about 20 children, in the age between 10 and 15, representatives from various fields of specially engaged groups of children, including technical, sports, science and social field, children involved in national and local relevant organizations, children from student councils, children from children’s city council, children from relevant nongovernmental organizations and also children involved in sports organizations. Some of the children belong to groups such as minorities, children of divorced parents, children from single-parent families, children from foster families, children with disabilities, children with chronic illnesses, and children living in poverty. The results of a qualitative study are presented on how children experience different aspects of well-being, what they consider to be the most important factors affecting their well-being, how in their opinion longitudinal studies of child well-being should be conducted, how to include children in longitudinal studies of well-being, what ethical issues are they most concerned with within longitudinal research with children and how they can be addressed. The results show that children and young people, through their understanding of well-being and by emphasizing the importance of taking into account the privacy and rights of children and young people as participants in scientific research, can significantly contribute to the quality of well-being research, so it is extremely important and useful to involve them actively in planning and conducting a longitudinal study of the well-being of children and young people.
关键词:well-being; children and young people; qualitative research; ethical issues.