This paper reflects on the opportunity to take steps in the direction of proposing international systems of subjective social indicators of children's and adolescents' well-being. In order to contextualize such a reflection, a brief summary of the historical and epistemological foundations of the concept of social indicators, and of some of the controversies associated with the research results during the first decades of its existence, is made. Such foundations, research results and consequent debates have mostly been developed considering only adult populations, but they are reviewed here to explore research goals in relation to children's and adolescents' well-being and to link these goals to political action and decision making and the evaluation of its impact. The lack of internationaly comparable subjective data on children's and adolescents' well-being at the macro level may be related, among other things, to the lack of political importance given to the younger population's point of view and to the lack of consistent or convincing research at a micro-level indicating what data-collection instruments are appropriate for making cross-national or cross-cultural comparisons. However, at present, research on children's and adolescents' own points of view about their living conditions-although still in its early stages and very heterogeneous-is already showing rapid advances and even provocative and unexpected results, of which a few examples are given. Tested instruments are already available, but systematic data collection is still scarce, and comparable data to be used for international comparisons is infrequent. Systematic data collection of children's and adolescents' perceptions, evaluations and aspirations that can be used as subjective social indicators requires political will, associated with the conviction that such data can be useful for decision-making and for evaluating social change. An increasing international interest in children's rights to social participation seems to be an opportunity to promote links with research on childrens' and adolescents' well-being, both objective and subjective.

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A one-year follow up study was conducted on a sample of 940 Spanish adolescents aged mostly from 10 to 15 in order to explore the extent to which their subjective well-being (SWB) changes from one year to the next, and whether these changes are the same for both genders regardless of the instrument used to measure SWB. Participants responded to the same four SWB scales twice, with an interval of a year in between. A decrease in the levels of SWB is identified from the years 11–12 onwards, the decrease in girls being more marked. Multiple-item, domain-based scales (Brief Multidimensional Student’s Life Satisfaction Scale and Personal Well-Being Index) are more sensitive than single-item scales (Overall Life Satisfaction and Happiness Taking into Account Overall Life) in detecting this decrease. Implications for the study of SWB are discussed from a developmental perspectiveThis article is based on data collected in the research project with reference number PSI2010-19404 and PSI2013-41512-P, founded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO

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An increasing number of scientific publications have provided data from different countries suggesting subjective well-being (SWB) continuously decreases during adolescence. A review of these publications reveals authors have used dissimilar scales in diverse countries. Using data from the international Children's Worlds project (N = 48,040), involving 15 countries, a comparative analysis was performed to determine how mean scores evolve with different SWB scales from the age of 8 onwards. The results support the hypothesis that the tendency of SWB to decrease with age starts at around 10 years of age in most countries, while also confirming that different psychometric scales display different levels of sensitivity to diverse sociocultural contexts and more than one should be used in any research on children and adolescents' SWB.