This book makes an important contribution to the qualitative social research and child well-being literatures. It includes reflections by researchers from a range of disciplines on the practice of doing research with children. All of these researchers are engaged in the project Children’s’ Understandings of Well-being: Local and Global Contexts (CUWB). The CUWB project adopts a qualitative research approach to understand child well-being from a multinational perspective, examining how children conceptualize and experience well-being in different parts of the world. It does so through a multi-stage, multi-method qualitative study, where children are asked about what well-being means to them, what is important to their well-being and what factors influence their well-being. Through comparative analysis, the overall aims of the study are to identify the shared and different meanings children have of well-being and what is the relative significance of local, regional, national and/or translocal contexts for these understandings and experiences. At the time of writing this preface, the research was being undertaken by researchers in 26 countries across five continents.

The results of the study thus far have been published elsewhere. The purpose of this book, based on contributions by 14 teams from 11 countries, is to reflect on the practices and realities of doing this research, to share some of the setbacks, challenges and lessons learned from the messiness of doing qualitative and comparative research with children.