Girls in Transition—How to Build Evidence and Gain Insight

As a result of the increased acknowledgment that children deserve a special focus in poverty measurement, the range of measures
aiming to capture the specific nature of child poverty and vulnerability has increased in size and scope over the last few
years. Despite evidence that the timing of poverty matters and that children in different age brackets have different needs,
child poverty approaches are largely developed for children as a homogenous group with limited age diversification. This paper
aims to address this gap within the debate on child poverty and well-being measurement and presents an explorative study to
assess and investigate the issues related to the measurement of poverty and vulnerability of a specific group in society,
namely adolescent girls, on the basis of a standardized and widely available household survey. The Multiple Indicator Cluster
Survey (MICS) 2006 data is used to investigate the specific situation of adolescent girls in Vietnam. The proposed conceptual
framework is multi-disciplinary and multidimensional in nature and incorporates issues of well-becoming as well as well-being.
Findings suggest that a diversified child poverty approach has the potential to capture and provide insight into issues specifically
relevant for a particular group in society. Nevertheless, more debate is required to address the appropriate balance between
the desire to draw a broadly interpretable picture on general conceptions of a specific group in society versus the acknowledgment
of the complex and diverse realities that children in this group face. Future research should also be directed towards addressing
the data limitations for diversified child poverty approaches.