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Using Social Indicators in Assessing Factors and Numbers of Street Children in the World

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Abstract

Many reports rely on the estimate that there are anywhere from 150 to 100 million street children in the world, although this figure has virtually no basis in empirical evidence. In this article, all the available data on the number of street children and relevant social indicators for 184 countries were gathered and statistically processed in order to produce a more reliable estimate. Aptekar (Cross-Cultural Research 28(3): 195–224, 1994) assumption on common denominators of countries with a high presence of street children was used as a starting point. The results show that there is about 10 to 15 million street children in the world. Two directions for future development are outlined: firstly, a more reliable and unified inductive approach for estimating the number of street children in individual countries is needed along with an appropriate methodological model and secondly, there is a need to create a global estimate of the number of all children living in the streets, which might be achieved by a similar methodological approach to the one used in this article.

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Notes

  1. These predictors were chosen on the basis of (1) author’s personal judgement of potential usefulness of an indicator as a predictor of the number of street children and (2) the availability of data for all, or at least a majority, of the analysed countries.

  2. Cases for which observed values differed from mean of the sample by more than two standard deviations were identified as outliers.

  3. This judgment is not based on any mathematical procedures. It is simply common sense attempt to quantify the obvious differences regarding the reliability of data in the four groups.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Lothar Geldbeutel for his assistance in editing and proofreading the manuscript of this paper.

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Correspondence to Andrej Naterer.

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Naterer, A., Lavrič, M. Using Social Indicators in Assessing Factors and Numbers of Street Children in the World. Child Ind Res 9, 21–37 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-015-9306-6

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