Strength in Numbers: Data Insights from Rural California

For those of us who live in California’s urban centers, it can be easy to forget that our state, in some ways, can be characterized as rural. About one-third of California’s counties have a child population of fewer than 10,000 kids each. In some of these counties, like Inyo and Alpine, the overall population density is roughly 1 person per square mile, compared to Orange County, where the density is 3,815 people per square mile.

It stands to reason that the data needs for California’s rural regions are different than in our suburban and urban cores. A few weeks ago, I traveled to Calaveras County and heard from folks there and in nearby Tuolumne, Amador, and Alpine counties about how kidsdata.org can meet their data needs. As one person noted, they know their counties without needing data to tell them what’s going on. Still, they made clear how critical it is for them to be able to accurately measure child well being – in part, to tell others what’s going on locally.

They suggested some great ideas – offering the capacity for users to create their own customized regions of data; ensuring we offer numbers in addition to rates/percentages for as many indicators as possible; and, when viewing data, creating the ability to sort, or separate out, California’s rural counties from other counties.

We’ll consider all of those ideas, as well as others that we heard in a trip up to Shasta County a few months ago. But we want to open up this discussion to others, too. If you have insights about how kidsdata.org can serve the unique needs of rural California, we’d love to know. Just enter a comment below, or on our Facebook page.

Posted by Andy Krackov

This entry was posted on Friday, October 1st, 2010 at 2:40 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.