Questions From Mendocino That May Help You, Too
Recently, we traveled up to Ukiah, CA, to provide an introduction to kidsdata.org for a group of key people working on behalf of children’s health in Mendocino County. The group participants asked several good questions about kidsdata.org and the data available on the site. Their questions, and our answers, are below.
Question: When viewing survey data, is there a way to find out the sample size?
Answer: In most cases, you will need to go to our data source, (a link to the source is found in the Data Source field below every table or graph) to learn the sample size of the survey. For example, you can find the number of students taking the California Healthy Kids Survey by selecting one of the reports on this page: http://chks.wested.org/reports/search. You can find information on the California Health Interview Survey sample sizes here: http://www.chis.ucla.edu/who-chis.html. The American Community Survey gives information about sample sizes here: http://www.census.gov/acs/www/methodology/sample_size_and_data_quality/ In general, we don’t report out small numbers from surveys. Those are reported as a Low Number Event, or LNE, in the graph.
Question: If the same data come from two different sources, how do you decide which to include on the site?
Answer: Our criteria include data quality, the consistent availability of data over time and across counties, and ease of accessing the data. We welcome feedback about our choices.
Question: Is it possible to compare multiple topics at once for your county, or compare your county to other counties, to see where there are outliers?
Answer: In early 2011 , we are aiming to launch a tool that will allow users to compare multiple regions and multiple topics in one table view. We’re adding it for the exact reason you mention — to offer the ability to quickly view outliers.
Question: Can you group similar counties together — by size, for example — without already knowing which counties are similar?
Answer: When displaying data results, we are exploring the possibility of grouping counties regionally, so that counties physically near each other are grouped together. We also could consider grouping according to population or economic make-up. We welcome your suggestions on groupings that would be useful for you.
Posted by kidsdata.org
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