Chapter 8: Sociocultural Considerations in Youth Pursuit of Well-Being

Youth well-being has received academic and political attention as it has been agreed upon that well-being is an important goal for societies (Sandin, 2014). Failure to support well-being during youth has been related to lower academic achievement (Miller et al., 2013) and self-esteem (Gardner & Webb, 2019). Although limited work has examined the determinants of youth well-being, which may have been due to the lack of theories and measures to assess well-being among children and adolescents (Savahl et al., 2019), researchers have recently come to recognize the critical importance of youth well-being. Given the universal importance of people’s well-being, it is important to understand how broad sociocultural factors may impact children’s well-being.