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Ferran Casas (born 1950) is a social psychologist and one of the pioneers in the study of children’s and adolescents’ subjective well-being. Casas is an Emeritus Professor University of Girona (Spain), and is currently a member of the Executive Committee for the International Society for Child Indicators (ISCI) and for the International Society for Quality of Life Studies (ISQOLS), and co-coordinator of the Children’s Worlds International Survey (ISCWeB, promoted by ISCI and the Jacobs Foundation).

Over the last 20 years, much of his research has concerned children’s and adolescents’ subjective well-being. He has been involved in many major international research collaborations and contributed greatly to this area over his career.

1.   Professional and academic life

2.   Research interests

3.   Awards

4.   References

5.   External links

PROFESSIONAL AND ACADEMIC LIFE

Casas was born in 1950 in a rural area at the limits of the municipality of Barcelona. He grew up interacting with nature and he wished to graduate in biology. In fact his two first scientific publications in international journals were about marine molluscs. However, the family circumstances made him study management.

When he was 24 he participated in the creation of a new NGO devoted to youth and he started to be a volunteer in another NGO caring for children in the child protection system. Then he decided to train as social educator and next, when he already was 29, as social psychologist. In 1977 he was a member of the professional team that managed the closure of the macro institutions for children in social need of the municipality of Barcelona and the creation of a network of new services for children at social risk. In 1980 he became the responsible expert to re-organize some of the residential-care services for children of the new created regional Government of Catalonia, and he participated in the creation of the new social services system in Catalonia.

In 1983 he became professor of Social Services at the School of Social Work of Barcelona (ICESB). This year he also accepted a job to reorganize the residential institutions for children of the provincial government of Barcelona, and to create new services to support the municipal social service teams to better intervene for families with children in the province. In 1986 he went back to work in the regional government to create the interdisciplinary teams to assess the situation of children needing state’s social protection and to design and supervise the intervention program to improve their situation – these EAIA teams were crucial in the improvement of the Catalan child protection system – nowadays in Catalonia there are 45 of these teams in work.

He became doctor in social psychology in 1988 at the University of Barcelona, with a dissertation on social and psychosocial indicators of situations of social risk for children and adolescents, which was published as a book in 1989. Also in 1989 he coordinated the publication of a first book with an extensive set of social indicators of risky situations for children in Catalonia, disaggregated by provinces, counties and big cities. And last but not least, in 1989 he became professor of social psychology at the University of Barcelona. He was a professor very much compromised with the professional practice, which he linked to the theoretical background provided by the quality of life perspective that he had studied with much detail during the elaboration of his doctoral dissertation.

In 1990 he was nominated the director of the Centro de Estudios del Menor (Child Studies Centre) depending of the Spanish Ministry of Social Affairs in Madrid that he leaded during 3 years. This was a very intensive period in his life - he participated in the promotion of Spanish, European and Latin American networks aiming to improve children’s rights and children’s quality of life. In July 1990, he had the opportunity to meet Alex Michalos and other “big names” of the social indicators movement at the ISA conference in Madrid, and also the outstanding authors of the Vienna school on the Sociology of Childhood.

From 1992 to 1996, he was the Chair of the Experts Committee on Childhood Policies of the Council of Europe (Strasbourg, France). The last days of his mandate he promoted a Recommendation on children participation in family and social life, that was adopted by the Committee of Ministers in 1998 (R-98-9). He was the first President of the Advisory Board of Childwatch International (Oslo, Norway), until 1996, and continued as a member of that Board until 2005.

He participated in the first international conference of the International Society for Quality of Life Studies (ISQOLS) in 1996 in Prince George, Canada, where he presented a pioneer paper on children’s rights and children’s quality of life, published in Social Indicators Research. This year he published a book particularly addressed to explain well-being and quality of life to students of psychology: Social well-being: a psychosocial introduction.

In 1997, he accepted the post of Director at the newly-created Research Institute on Quality of Life (IRQV) at the University of Girona and left his position as professor at the University of Barcelona. In this Research Institute he created and still leads the Research Team on Childhood, Adolescence, Children’s Rights and their Quality of Life (ERIDIQV).

Due to his previous experience organising international conferences while he was the Director of the Childhood Studies Centre in Madrid, Alex Michalos proposed him to organise the second international ISQOLS conference at the University of Girona in July 2000 – and he accepted. He stayed as director of this Research Institute until 2008.

In 1998 he published a key book in his personal history: Infancia: perspectivas psicosociales (Childhood: psychosocial perspectives) that articulated and summarised much of his previous work on child well-being. This book had a relevant influence in Spain and in several Latin American countries.

In 1998 he became involved in the Socrates European network on the rights of the child, coordinated by Eugeen Verhellen (University of Ghent) and in 1999 the European summer course of this network was held at the University of Girona. By that time he also created the Catalan Interdisciplinary Network of Researchers on Childhood (XCIII) that became a “key institution” of Childwatch International.

During 18 years he was the director of the journal Intervención Psicosocial, published by the Spanish and the Madrid Association of Psychologists. In this journal, articles by Alex Michalos, Ed Diener, Ruut Veenhoven, Robert Cummins, Joe Sirgy and other internationally well-known authors on quality of life research were published in Spanish, making their work more accessible to the Spanish speaking audience.

After retiring in September 2015, he became Emeritus Professor at the University of Girona and is now mainly devoted to research.

He is still a member of the Executive Committe for the International Society for Child Indicators (ISCI) and for the International Society for Quality of Life Studies (ISQOLS). At present he is one of the coordinators of the Children’s Worlds International Survey (ISCWeB, promoted by ISCI and the Jacobs Foundation), that collected data on children’s subjective well-being in 15 countries in 2012 and in more than 40 in 2018/2019.

Altogether he has authored or co-authored 21 books, more than 40 book-chapters (in 9 different languages) and over 100 papers in scientific journals. He is one of the co-editors of the 5-volumes Handbook of Child Well-Being. Theories, Methods and Policies in Global Perspective published by Springer.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

During the last 20 years, he has been devoted to very different topics of research, although they were most often related to children’s and adolescents’ well-being and quality of life. However, he has also collaborated with research teams on other topics (i.e.: elder people quality of life; social services program evaluation; and so on). It is difficult to highlight some of his more outstanding researches or publications. The last 10 years he has been involved in 10 international research projects, 3 of them supported by the European Comission – the most recent one being the YIPPEE project (Young People from a Public care background pathways to Education in Europe). This project was related to the research line on child protection systems, in which he has participated in a broad diversity of research activities.

In the field of children’s rights, in the frame of a collaborative research program between Spain and Italy, he used a methodology on “children’s rights dilemmas” that afterwards has been translated to different languages and replicated in several countries.

Another field of research that motivated him has been on audiovisual media use by adolescents. One of his preferred topics of analysis used to be on what happens when audiovisual media or information and communication technologies are mediating the relationships between adults and adolescents (i.e.: between parents and children, between teachers and students). In this field it is worth to underline the research project supported by Childwatch International that was developed in Spain, Norway, India, South Africa and Brasil, which produced interesting analysis and publications.

At the beginning of the new millennium Casas was very interested in researching about the qualities adolescents aspire to in their future. I think one outstanding article in this field is on the values adolescents aspire to, their well-being and the values parents aspire to for their children, published in Social Indicators Research in 2007.

Last, but not least, the topic of adolescents’ – and then children’s – subjective well-being has been doubtless the main focus of his basic research and also of his international comparative research during the last 20 years. His review published in Child Indicators Research in 2011 is a good summary of his worries. However, he has also devoted a lot of time and efforts to validate subjective well-being psychometric scales cross-culturally, and his participation in the Children’s Worlds project has promoted key publications in this field.

He also presented one of the first ever done comparative analyses of the subjective well-being of parents and their own children in the Journal of Happiness Studies.

AWARDS

Casas received the ISQOLS Distinguished Fellow Quality-of-Life Award 2014 for evidence of a lifetime and substantial contribution to QOL research at the Frei Universität in Berlin.

In 2016 he also received the Award in Honour of Alfred J. Kahn and Sheila B. Kamerman in recognition to his outstanding contribution to the research on children’s subjective well-being indicators from an international perspective, at the ISCI conference in Montreal.

REFERENCES

EXTERNAL LINKS

University of Girona

Research Institute on Quality of Life

Research Team on Childhood, Adolescence, Children’s Rights and their Quality of Life

Children’s Worlds International Survey (ISCWeB, promoted by ISCI and the Jacobs Foundation)

The International Society for Child Indicators (ISCI)

Jacobs Foundation

International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies

Childwatch International

ICESB