Patterns of Children’s Perception of Safety across Diverse Contexts and their Subjective Well-Being

This study explores patterns in children’s safety perceptions across various contexts, including home, school, neighborhood, and country, and examines how these patterns relate to their subjective well-being (SWB). Using data of 10- and 12-year-old children from the third wave of the International Survey of Children’s Well-Being (ISCWeB), we first conducted a latent profile analysis to classify children based on their safety perceptions across these contexts. Three latent profiles of safety perceptions emerged consistently across each age group, and the proportion of children in each profile varied across countries. Multinomial hierarchical modeling was conducted to assess how individual and county-level factors are associated with a child’s likelihood of belonging to each profile. The variance explained by the models suggested significant contributions of country-level variables, such as under-five mortality rates, to the latent profiles of safety perceptions among children. Significant differences in SWB were observed across the profiles. Children in the high-level safety group reported the highest satisfaction with their safety and the highest levels of SWB, whereas children in the low-level safety group reported the lowest satisfaction with safety and SWB. Mediation analysis confirmed that satisfaction with safety partially mediates the relationship between group membership and SWB. The findings highlight the significant impact of children’s safety perceptions in different environments on their overall well-being. This underscores the importance of societal efforts to enhance children’s perceptions of safety, particularly within the home, on a global scale.