Assessment of well-being in kindergarten children: how do qualitative and quantitative methods communicate?

Child well-being is a major concern in Danish kindergartens, but well-being is a multi-dimensional concept that may be evaluated in a variety of ways. This article explores the well-being of kindergarten children from a methodological perspective. It presents results from a quantitative survey study and from a parallel qualitative interview study and discusses how the disparate findings communicate. The strategy of choosing a standard survey did not provide valuable data, but the meaning ascribed to well-being in the two approaches are compared and the article points to development of a future mixed methods study, in which child well-being is defined and evaluated with attention to play, social well-being, bodily skills and aesthetics.