Posts Tagged by data sharing
|June 19, 2013||Posted by M. P. under Federal Government, News, Policy, Research||
An April 2013 briefing to Congress on surveys and statistics focused on the problematic trend of declining response rates for federal surveys, including the American Community Survey and the National Survey of Child Health. The briefing, Policy Makers & Businesses Need Reliable Information and Data: The Impact of Falling Response Rates to Social Surveys and What Can Be Done, organized by The American Academy of Political and Social Science (AAPSS), outlined the risks to research and the impact on policy-making if response rates to surveys on health, employment and household continue to subside. The largest risk is that of biased results. Other issues:
- Nonresponse rates currently range from 30 to more than 60 percent. This is an all-time high.
- Over 60 percent of nonresponses were refusals, while approximately another 1/4 were due to the inability to contact the intended recipient.
- Young single-person households, minorities, renters and the poor were less likely to respond.
- One-time surveys have higher nonresponse rates than more complex longitudinal studies that follow the same group of respondents over period of time.
While incentives (such as a gift card or a small amount of money) for completing and returning a survey would boost response rates, it would also increase costs – a risky proposition in an atmosphere of austerity. The authors of a related paper, Where Do We Go from Here? Nonresponse and Social Measurement, published in the January 2013 volume of AAPSS’s The Annals, suggest that a solution to this growing problem is a strategic outreach plan to inform both politicians and the public of the purpose of national surveys. Clear explanation of what the data is used for, as well as the regulations and protocols in place to protect it from being presented other than in aggregate form could have a favorable impact on perception. Unfortunately for these and other large-scale surveys, the recent news of metadata collected absent suspicion may have even the most tech-savvy survey-loving among us rethinking issues of privacy, transparency and information storage and retrieval.
Perhaps in the future these surveys that, by the way, inform funding decisions on infrastructure, education, and transportation to name a few, will be deemed too intrusive and/or obsolete and left behind. Funding and other governing decisions can then be made based on variables extracted from all that we have uploaded onto the digital data heap. So, will big data replace big surveys? Will traditional statistical methods be successful in tracking, analyzing and accurately reporting big data to inform policies at the federal, state and local level?
|November 13, 2012||Posted by M. P. under Education, Policy, Research||
Got the comparative analysis blues? Need more or better data? Well, difficult-to-find data on pre-K programs just got easier to access thanks to a combined effort from the Early Education Initiative and the Federal Education Budget Project (FEBP) of the New America Foundation. An expansion of the FEBP database added 2007 through 2011 enrollment and funding information on public early education programs at both the state and local levels – including Head Start and federally mandated special education services to young children.
Alex Holt gives an overview of this valuable resource at the Foundation’s website, and discusses the serious deficit in reliable pre-K data reporting in the brief (with Lisa Guernsey) Counting Kids and Tracking Funds: Falling Short at the Local Level.
|September 21, 2012||Posted by M. P. under Behavorial Health, Elderly, Health, Research||
An international study out of Australia found that happiness peaks (on average) during a person’s 60’s, then begins to decline, before dropping off considerably. Earlier this year, Dr Tony Beatton of Queensland University of Technology and Professor Paul Frijters of The University of Queensland reported findings from their analysis of data from approximately 60,000 people from Australia, Britain and Germany. Highlights include:
- Persons entering middle/retirement age (55 to 75 years) reported the highest levels of happiness
- The data from Germany showed a decrease in happiness as persons entered adulthood, then a peak at age 65 – a pattern different from the other data
- Happiness dropped significantly after age 75 across cases
This research adds to the discussion of the ‘U bend of happiness” (see a great write-up on it in The Economist), the concept that happiness ultimately culminates in late middle age; but Beatton and Frijters also address the drop in happiness after age 75, suggesting that it is related to the onset or worsening of health problems. This aligns with prior research on the relationship between the presentation of depression symptoms and medical issues/illnesses among the elderly population.
Study Citation: Frijters, Paul & Beatton, Tony, 2012. “The mystery of the U-shaped relationship between happiness and age,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 82(2), pages 525-542
|July 7, 2012||Posted by M. P. under Children and Family, Education, Federal Government||
Data released by the U.S. Department of Education quantifies the extent of homelessness among American youth, as over one million homeless children are enrolled in preschool through the 12th grade in public schools across the country. The 2010-11 count (1,065,794) is up 13 percent from 2009. For the purposes of the research, youth are classified as “enrolled” if they attend class and participate in activities at a public school.
According to the report, Education for Homeless Children and Youths Program Data Collection Summary, a presentation of analyses from the school year 2010-11 (including comparisons to data from prior years) the number of homeless children enrolled in public schools increased 57 percent since the beginning of the recession (the 2006-2007 school year). States with the largest increases in the numbers of homeless students include Kentucky and Utah (47 percent), Michigan and West Virginia (38 percent), and Mississippi (35 percent).
A positive takeaway from the report is that the academic performance of homeless students in grades 3-12 appears to have improved somewhat. In 2008-09, 49 percent of these students met or exceeded standard state proficiency in reading and 48 percent in math; in 2009-10, 52 percent of grade homeless students in grades 3-12 met or exceeded standard state proficiency in reading, and 50 percent did the same in math.