Longitudinal Surveys of Children (1998) / Chapter Skim
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Major Issue Areas
Major Issue Areas
Pages 3-12
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From page 3... ...
This report is intended to be used by representatives from federal and state agencies engaged in research, data collection, program evaluation, and policy analysis pertaining to children and youth; administration officials engaged in policy formulation, implementation, and evaluation; congressional staff; public and private sponsors of research on children, youth, and families; and data users in academic communities and research organizations that focus on children and their well-being. MAJOR ISSUE AREAS Four major issue areas emerged from the workshop: (1)
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From page 4... ...
Theoretical Issues Workshop participants discussed the extent to which specific theoretical perspectives guided the design of the surveys. They also discussed the theoretical underpinnings of measurements used in longitudinal studies on children, including such specific measures as those used in capturing issues related to child development.
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From page 5... ...
Workshop participants agreed that, in order to understand outcomes for children and youth, surveys must include environmental influences that go beyond the home to the neighborhood, child care provider, school settings, and perhaps even the work site and the judicial system. The workshop participants also agreed that surveys need to consider multiple dimensions of child well-being.
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From page 6... ...
However, financial and human project resources impose practical constraints on how intensively any given aspect of child development can be assessed. The participants thought, for example, that current clinical assessment scales are not always appropriate for surveys.
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From page 7... ...
Social science concepts such as cohesion and informal social control may be captured, but measures linking service availability and service utilization at the community level to outcomes for children and youth are lacking. Participants called for better measures of the influence of environment on child development, especially the impact of the neighborhood.
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From page 8... ...
Participants expressed concern about the paucity of relevant policy data to study the effects on children and youth of program and policy changes in such areas as welfare reform. The ensuing discussion focused on three areas in which data appear to be lacking or inadequate: time use, fatherhood, and program evaluation.
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From page 9... ...
Program Evaluation Data At the workshop, considerable discussion focused on the extent to which existing surveys can contribute to efforts to assess the effects of recent governmental policy changes on children, youth, and families. In particular, participants debated the ways in which survey data can provide information about the impact of recent welfare reform legislations on the outcomes of children and youth.
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From page 10... ...
; the Measuring Child Outcomes Under Various State Welfare Waivers project (with support from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, NICHD, and private foundations, Child Trends is working with the states of California, Connecticut, Florida, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont, and Virginia to assess the implications for children of state welfare reforms begun under waivers to the old AFDC program and continued under TANF)
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From page 11... ...
Although the time between data collection and public release varies, it has become increasingly simple to obtain data with the advent of computer disks, the Internet, and electronic data file transfers. Universal availability of data, however, raises a concern for proper analytical applications of data (e.g., when and how to use weighting, how to portray outcome measures)
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From page 12... ...
Participants agreed that a survey's protocol must be clear, concise, and accessible to the user community and that efforts should be made to facilitate proper use of the data for example, by providing computer programs for computing standard errors, rather than requiring users to do their own calculations. Beyond such efforts to avoid misuses of data, workshop participants did not think they should take responsibility for the public's use or interpretation of data.
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