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Over the last decade, there has been dramatic growth in the collection and dissemination of information related to the well-being of children in the United States (Brown and Moore, 2003). Governmental agencies and private foundations, believing that child well-being indicators are a vital component of the policymaking process, have harvested diverse data sources to produce indicators for children at various stages of development. While certain important gaps remain, an extensive indicator system has evolved, containing perhaps the richest and deepest collection of child well-being information of any nation in the world (Brown and Moore, 2003).

Many strong arguments can be made to support the collection of good indicators of children’s well-being and for using such indicators to informpolicy and practice. Indeed, indicators such as rates of teen pregnancy, high school graduation, or dropping out can support, contradict, or generally inform public and political opinion about the circumstances of young people today and that is why great effort and resources are expended in collecting and refining child indicator data.1 Indicators, however, are just one of several important tools for policymakers to rely upon when faced with making difficult policy decisions. Indicator data alone cannot provide information or specific guidance about a policy response to a social problem. Experimental studies are a key type of social science research—the “gold standard” method for untangling cause from effect—that can fulfill this role for policymakers and serve as a necessary complement to indicator data to best inform policy decisions. Here we make the case for the role of experimental studies as the link between indicator data (identifying a social policy concern) and policy decisions.We describe how the results from experimental studies can inform policy decisions as well as the choice of which indicators to study.

It is well known that news coverage of a topic influences the public’s perception of the importance of that topic. This “agenda-setting effect” of the mass media (McCombs and Shaw, 1972; Rogers and Dearing, 1988) represents one of the key theories about how the news media affect public opinion. Agenda-setting influence occurs at two levels. The first involves the salience or prominence of a given issue on the public agenda, establishing for the public what is important to ; while the second relates to the specific views or opinions the public holds on a topic, or more simply, about issues that are deemed important to think about (McCombs and Reynolds, 2002).

The previous chapters focus on a wide range of indicators of child well-being, their uses and potential uses, and numerous methods of data collection and dissemination. At the same time, the breadth of perspectives and range of examples for the measurement and use of indicators illustrates the lack of solid knowledge and consensus about what types of indicators are most salient to national and local policymakers, to program directors, and to academic constituencies. Furthermore, we still lack an understanding of the conditions (context and mode of dissemination) that lead to specific indicators having an impact. In this chapter, we attempt to identify important gaps in our knowledge of child indicators and suggest ways in which research can begin to fill those gaps. We also discuss how research can best make use of indicators.

The volume is devoted to the use of childhood social indicators to improve the wellbeing (or, in Ben-Arieh’s terms, the “well-becoming”) of children. While it draws upon the output of an international meeting at Columbia University, it is part of a series of exchanges organized by a multinational group of which Asher Ben-Arieh is a leading figure. (See bibliography of Ben-Arieh and Goerge in this volume for earlier reports.) While the Ben-Arieh and Goerge paper has much of the flavor of an introduction, the Teitler and Ben-Arieh contribution, written after the discussion, could serve very well as a volume conclusion.