Using Social Indicators in Assessing Factors and Numbers of Street Children in the World Andrej Naterer & Miran Lavrič Accepted: 22 February 2015 / Published online: 11 March 2015 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 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 proc- essed 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 develop- ment 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 appropri- ate 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. Keywords Street children . World . Statistical estimation . Definition 1 Introduction The exact number of street children is impossible to quantify, but it is likely to number in the tens of millions or higher, some estimates place the figure as high as 100 million (UNICEF n.d.). When reporting on the global number of street children, a frequently cited estimate among street children researchers is more than 100 million street children and rising Child Ind Res (2016) 9:21–37 DOI 10.1007/s12187-015-9306-6 A. Naterer (*) : M. Lavrič Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia e-mail: andrej.naterer@um.si M. Lavrič e-mail: miran.lavric@um.si