Start with a simple question
What does it mean to act in a child's best interests?
The question sounds simple.
But answering it can involve many different dimensions of a child's life: rights, voice, family, culture, identity, health, education, safety, services, place, experience, and the institutions making decisions.
Researchers have studied these dimensions from different disciplinary perspectives for many years. The opportunity is not to replace that work, but to connect some of it.
This is where Insight begins.
From the child to the connections
Start with the child.
A child is not simply a case, a statistic, or a point on a map. Children have rights, relationships, experiences, and perspectives of their own.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child places the child's best interests alongside the child's right to express views in matters affecting them. Lundy (2007) further developed thinking about meaningful participation through a framework connecting space, voice, audience, and influence.
This gives us our first connections:
Child → Rights → Voice → Participation
Then we connect the child with family and culture.
Family relationships can provide support, identity, security, and connection. For First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children in Canada, family, community, culture, language, identity, and cultural continuity are also important considerations in understanding the child's best interests.
This leads to another question:
How do relationships, culture, identity, and community shape what we understand to be in a child's best interests?
The question has now become larger than the child alone.
Connect health and services
Health introduces another set of connections.
A child's well-being can be influenced by housing, income, education, environment, transportation, family circumstances, and access to appropriate services.
But a service being available does not necessarily mean that it is accessible.
Researchers have used spatial approaches to examine this distinction. Freisthler's work examined the geographic availability and accessibility of supportive services for families involved with child welfare. Robertson and Wier (1998) demonstrated how GIS could support community-based child welfare through service planning, case management, and evaluation.
This gives us another question:
Where are services, who can reach them, and what happens when access is unequal?
The question now connects the child with the service environment around them.
Connect GIS and place
GIS adds another perspective: place.
We can use GIS to:
map where children and families live;
map where services are located;
examine distance and travel;
examine proximity and geographic accessibility;
identify differences between communities; and
explore how the spatial distribution of services relates to populations and need.
Dorch and colleagues (2010), for example, used GIS to examine social-service availability and proximity in relation to child welfare populations. Their work demonstrates how spatial analysis can reveal differences in the service environment.
But there is an important limitation:
A map is not the answer.
A map can show that a service is close.
It cannot tell us whether the child can actually use it.
It cannot tell us whether the family has transportation.
It cannot tell us whether the service is culturally appropriate.
It cannot tell us how the child experiences that service.
GIS can therefore reveal a spatial pattern without necessarily explaining its meaning.
That creates another connection:
GIS → Spatial pattern → Question about experience
Connect surveys and people's perspectives
Surveys provide another way of looking at the problem.
A survey can ask children, parents, practitioners, or community members about experiences, priorities, barriers, perceptions, or decision-making. This can provide evidence that cannot be obtained from a map alone.
For example, a GIS analysis might show that two communities have different levels of geographic access to services.
A survey might show that people in one community experience those differences as a significant barrier.
Another method might then help explain why.
The important point is that the spatial pattern and the reported experience are not competing forms of evidence. They can inform one another.
GIS can show a difference.
A survey can help us understand how that difference is experienced.
Research by Dzaman (2015) provides another important connection. Her University of Saskatchewan doctoral research examined how human service executives in Saskatchewan understood the Best Interests of the Child. The study showed that understandings of Best Interests could differ across human-service sectors and policy environments.
This adds an institutional dimension:
The same principle can be understood differently depending on the context in which decisions are made.
Connect evidence with lived experience
At this point, several forms of evidence begin to come together.
GIS can help us understand where things are and how spatial relationships differ.
Surveys can help us understand what people report, perceive, or prioritize.
Administrative data can describe populations, services, and patterns of service use.
Qualitative research can explore experiences, meanings, relationships, and context.
Children and families can contribute knowledge that may not appear in conventional datasets.
Community and Indigenous knowledge can provide additional perspectives on place, culture, relationships, identity, and well-being.
The question is not:
Which method is best?
Instead, we can ask:
What does each form of knowledge allow us to see?
And then ask:
What becomes visible when those forms of knowledge are connected?
This is an important distinction.
Connecting evidence does not mean treating every type of evidence as interchangeable. A GIS analysis answers different questions from a survey. A survey answers different questions from an interview. Community knowledge may reveal things that neither can capture.
The value can come from understanding how these forms of knowledge relate to one another.
Connect evidence with decision-making
Best Interests is also a decision-making question.
We can ask:
Who makes the decision?
What legislation and policies guide it?
Which professional perspectives are involved?
What evidence is considered?
How are children's views incorporated?
How are family, culture, community, and context considered?
Dzaman's research is particularly useful here because it demonstrates that Best Interests is interpreted within professional, organizational, policy, and legislative environments.
This means that understanding the child alone may not be enough.
We also need to understand the environment in which decisions about the child are made.
The connection therefore becomes:
Child → Evidence → Institutions → Decision
And this opens another question:
How does the environment in which a decision is made shape how Best Interests is understood and applied?
What changes when the context changes?
Now consider two children living in different communities.
One lives in a large city with many services nearby.
Another lives in a rural or remote community where accessing the same service may require considerable travel.
Their geographic, service, family, community, and lived contexts may be different.
So we can ask:
When the context changes, what changes in our understanding of the child's best interests?
And another question follows:
What should remain fundamental regardless of context?
Comparison is therefore not necessarily about ranking communities.
It can help us understand how context changes the problem.
The same service may have a different meaning in different places. The same distance may represent a minor inconvenience for one family and a significant barrier for another. The same policy may be interpreted differently across professional or institutional settings.
Comparison helps bring those differences into view.
Now connect the connections
We have moved from a simple question to a connected set of questions:
Child
↓
Rights and voice
↓
Family, culture and identity
↓
Health and well-being
↓
Services and access
↓
Place and GIS
↓
Surveys and people's perspectives
↓
Lived and community knowledge
↓
Institutions and decision-making
↓
Context and comparison
None of these connections is new.
Researchers have been studying children's rights, participation, family, culture, health, services, geography, GIS, surveys, lived experience, and institutional decision-making for many years.
The opportunity is to bring some of these bodies of knowledge into conversation around the same question.
What Insight adds
Insight does not claim to have invented these connections.
It does not replace established research methods.
It does not suggest that GIS can determine what is best for a child.
It does not suggest that a survey can capture the whole experience.
And it does not attempt to reduce Best Interests to a single numerical measure.
Instead, Insight asks a different question:
What becomes visible when different bodies of knowledge are connected around the same question?
The purpose is to make connections visible, identify gaps, compare contexts, and develop better questions.
Sometimes a connection may reveal a research gap.
Sometimes it may reveal a practical problem.
Sometimes it may show that two communities are experiencing the same issue differently.
Sometimes it may bring researchers from different disciplines into conversation.
And sometimes it may simply lead to a better question.
From one question to a better question
We began with:
What is in the best interests of the child?
After following the connections, we might ask:
How do rights, relationships, culture, lived experience, health, services, place, spatial access, people's experiences, evidence, and decision-making environments shape what is understood to be in a child's best interests?
That is the movement Insight is interested in.
The original question has not disappeared.
It has become more informed by the connections around it.
One question. Many connections. Better questions.
Selected research
Dorch, E. L., et al. (2010). Social service availability & proximity and the over-representation of minority children in child welfare. Journal of Health and Human Services Administration, 33(3), 277–320.
Dzaman, S. J. (2015). Human Service Executives' Insights on the Best Interests of the Child. Doctoral dissertation, University of Saskatchewan.
Freisthler, B. (2007). Child welfare services need and access to supportive services: A GIS analysis. Child Welfare, 86(3), 33–58.
Lundy, L. (2007). 'Voice' is not enough: Conceptualising Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. British Educational Research Journal, 33(6), 927–942.
Robertson, J. G., & Wier, K. R. (1998). Using geographical information systems to enhance community-based child welfare services. Child Maltreatment, 3(3), 224–234.
Stafford, M., et al. (2021). Why having a voice is important to children who are involved in family support services. Child Abuse & Neglect, 115, 104987.
Discussion (1)
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