Moving towards the development of children’s rights implementation scale: A pilot study of measurement items

Abstract

Current literature does not provide a holistic way to measure children’s rights implementation outcomes. Therefore, it is difficult to assess the effect of children’s rights practice. The measurement limitations prevent this framework from fully contributing to academic discourse, policy development, and social work practice. A conceptual framework that shapes children’s rights in three domains—protection, provision, and participation—was applied to the second wave of the Children’s Worlds project (ICWBS; Rees & Main, 2015). This dataset allowed empirical testing of potential measurement items for a children’s rights implementation scale. A subsample of 12-year-olds (n=17, 269) was utilized. Twenty-one items were pulled from the Children’s Worlds dataset in order to represent the articles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses in Mplus were conducted to test potential items. As a result, the model with 14 items yielded the best model ft and was proposed as a pilot version of the Provision and Participation Rights Implementation Scale. Suggestions for the further development of the scale are proposed.