Social Indicators and Public Policy: Call for Papers

Here's a call for papers, courtesy of the ISQOLS listserve. If you're interested in subscribing to the listserve, the information is provided below.

Dear Colleagues,

Today I'd like to draw your attention to the next activity of the ISA - Working Group "Social Indicators", which will be part of the 1st ISA World Forum on "Sociological Research and Public Debate," taking place in Barcelona, September 5-8, 2008. The Working Group "Social Indicators" is organizing a conference track entitled "Are Things Getting Better or Worse, and Why? The Role of Social Indicators to Inform Public Policy."

A call for papers is published at the following website:
http://www.gesis.org/Sozialindikatoren/PDFs/Barcelona-Forum-CFP-WG06.pdf

You'll find more information on the ISA Forum at the ISA-website:
http://www.isa-sociology.org/barcelona_2008/

The deadline for submission of abstracts for our conference track is December 31, 2007.

Looking forward to your applications!

With best wishes,
Heinz-Herbert Noll
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Dr. Heinz-Herbert Noll
Director Social Indicators Department
GESIS-ZUMA
Postfach 122155
D-68072 Mannheim (Germany)
Phone:+49-621-1246-241; Fax: +49-621-1246-182/100
email: heinz-herbert.noll [at] gesis.org
http://www.gesis.org/Sozialindikatoren/
http://www.gesis.org/en/social_monitoring/social_indicators/index.htm
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Training Opportunity: DataPlace

From DataPlace.org:

Join Us for Advanced DataPlace Training in Portland, Dec. 12

Have you attended a DataPlace demonstration, and want to learn more about how to use DataPlace in your work? Join us in Portland, Ore. on December 12 for a full day advanced course, Working with DataPlace Maps and Data to Make Your Case. Learn how to show funders and stakeholders where the greatest need for your services is in your community, and how to demonstrate where you've had the most impact over time. DataPlace™, a free online data and mapping system, assembles in one place a variety of housing and demographic data at geographic scales ranging from the neighborhood to the nation.

This new course is for participants who are already familiar with DataPlace and want to improve their skills at using this powerful tool on issues they are facing in their work. You will analyze use cases from other community development organizations and consider how they might apply to your own situation. You will also work with DataPlace via the Internet during the course to create maps, charts, etc., and be able to retrieve these documents back at your office for your use.

For more information, and to register online, visit: http://www.nw.org/network/training/courses/default.asp?course=ucrsdetailAll1.asp?course=NR245

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MacArthur Foundation's New Directions in Community Change

The MacArthur Foundation just published a newsletter called New Directions in Community Change. It begins with a President's Message that highlights the importance of looking at the overall quality of life in urban renewal, in this case in Chicago, and the need to track progress through a series of broad community indicators.

The newsletter continues its conversation about the use of data to spur and measure community progress. Articles like Measuring for Success, Community Mapping Comes Full Circle, and Bridging the Information Gap in Urban Markets add depth to the discussion.

For community indicators practitioners and neighborhood indicators advocates, this is an amazing effort. Bringing residents and volunteers together with smart phone technology to provide accurate, on the ground measures of neighborhood conditions is really quite exciting. Data partners assist revitalization efforts in understanding potential markets. Composite indicators measure neighborhood progress.

Some of the data partners in this effort include the Metro Chicago Information Center, the Urban Markets Initiative, and the National Infrastructure for Community Statistics.

Let me know if you've got examples of this kind of collaboration with your community indicators efforts. I'd love to highlight the work.

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Quote of the Day

Heard on NPR this morning:

"The devil's in the disaggregations."


Anyone catch the name of the speaker? Let me know, please.

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Training on Using Community Data

I enjoy hearing about how other communities help people use their indicators reports. If you do community training on how to use data, please tell me about it and we'll see if we can start a conversation on tips, techniques, and traps in helping improve statistical literacy.

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Obesity Statistics

I saw this chart, found at WellingtonGrey.net, to be a powerful way to display data in ways guaranteed to spark conversation. (Click on the picture to enlarge.)


The execution is brilliant in its simplicity. Once again, the challenge for our community indicators projects is to display the data in ways that provoke conversation and promote understanding. I think this chart does that.

What other examples do you have that we can share?

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Engaging Citizens in Public Performance Measurement

Here's a heads-up from the Public Performance Measurement Reporting Network (PPMRN). A new report has been released which you may find useful in your own community indicators efforts, especially in trying to integrate community indicators with government performance measurement systems.

Engaging Citizens in Measuring and Reporting Government Performance and Community Conditions: -- A Manager's Guide

Alfred T. Ho
Associate Professor
School of Public & Environmental Affairs
Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis

Report link: http://www.businessofgovernment.org/main/publications/grant_reports/details/index.asp?gid=301

This report presents specific guidelines to local public managers as well as nonprofit leaders on how they can work with each other and with citizen representatives to use public input to guide government performance and community conditions reporting. This report challenges the traditional notion of "performance management," in which public managers dictate what indicators should be used and how data should be analyzed and presented and suggests that citizen engagement should play a larger role in the process.

Two models of public engagement are recommended in this report. The "partnership" model emphasizes equal sharing of power between citizen representatives and public officials in deciding what and how performance indicators should be used. This model is illustrated through a case study of the Des Moines "Citizen-Initiated Performance Assessment" project in 2001-2004, which was a partnership between the city government of Des Moines, Des Moines Neighbors, and several universities in the region. The second model, which is the "community indicators" model, gives even more power to the public by empowering and supporting nonprofit organizations in a community to measure the quality of life and policy outcomes through self-organized efforts and collaborative partnerships between government, nonprofit and business organizations. This approach is illustrated in this report through a case study of the Boston Indicators Project, which just released its 2004-2006 report in June 2007.

From the Des Moines and Boston experiences, the report provides specific recommendations on the following aspects:

• how to prepare government and community leadership to engage the public in performance measurement and community conditions reporting before the project launch;
• how to solicit public input and engage the general citizenry effectively in designing performance indicators;
• how to report community conditions and program results effectively to citizens so that the content of the report, whether in paper or in electronic media, is meaningful, understandable, accessible, and credible to citizens;
• how to engage the public in follow-up after the release of a performance report so that the analysis can be used to empower policymakers, community leaders and public managers to take responsive action.
  

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Arizona Indicators Project

The Arizona Indicators Project "is a collaboration of Arizona State University, the Arizona Republic and the State of Arizona. The project seeks to build a shared, community-focused data repository for the Phoenix Metropolitan Area and for the State." That's the description given on the front page of the Project, and it already has two important lessons for us: (1) thank your sponsors early and often, and (2) especially thank media sponsors, and you might get press like this.

The report itself lets you browse five content-specific dashboards (economic indicators, quality of life indicators, sustainability indicators, education indicators, and innovation indicators), as well as a dashboard for "comparing Metro Phoenix". It also has two sets of interactive maps, economic and sustainability.

If we click on the "innovation indicators" section to see what they're measuring, you can see the lessons in design continue. The different sections on this page are useful for explaining what it is the user is about to see. They begin by identifying their collaborative partners, explain the purpose of the section, link to more information, and provide an opportunity for feedback.

They then explain that the innovation indicators are provided in two sections: inputs to innovation and outputs of innovation. The next section is interesting:

Rationale for Innovation Indicators: In modern economies, innovation and new technologies lead to economic gains in the communities in which they are adopted. A good economic foundation nurtures innovation, and innovation is necessary if an area wishes to be an economic leader. Once an area decides it wants to be a leader, the challenge is to develop a business and socioeconomic environment that promotes innovation. The innovation indicators contained in this dashboard assist individuals and policy makers to assess the local innovation environment and to make policy decisions that would allow Arizona to better compete in this environment.

They then provide navigation tips, usage notes, and a caveat.

So I click through the inputs to innovation, and then click the research and development link, and then click through to patent applications -- and finally I get to the data. The site is well organized and pops up quickly, and I suppose five clicks to get to the data isn't excessive -- but the number of steps makes it really hard to get a quick overview of the data sets provided.

The good news is that the data are provided in side-by-side maps and data tables, with opportunities to select the comparison years and the raw data in front of you. I really like that. You can save it, download it, print it as a PDF, and more. In addition, each indicator has an "information" icon, which provides an indicator description, its classification within the set (its category and subcategory, the definition, data sources, rationale for inclusion, and comments on the quality of the data. As nearly perfect a data site as I've ever seen, and I highly recommend that you check it out for your own community indicators efforts.

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Mashups and Data Visualizations

Three recent presentations and one announcement may be of interest to community indicators practitioners. The first is from the recent InfoVis conference where folks from Google, Swivel, and Many Eyes shared their perspectives on the impact of social data visualization.

The second came from a librarian, Darlene Fichter, sharing how to do mash-ups and data visualizations using available (as in free) tools on the web, with lots of examples. This is where you use existing data from other places with some sort of data visualization tool, such as mapping technology, to create something new and informative that displays data in a way that makes more sense to the viewer or illustrates connections not otherwise as readily apparent.

The third is from the IEEE international conference on data mining, where the folks from Swivel shared their perspectives on "motivations and challenges for technology in collaborative data analysis and visualization".

The announcement (sort of a pre-announcement of an intention to try to do something worth announcing later) is that GraphWise and Swivel have begun talking together, which can only be good news for those of us who want information easily available and compellingly displayed.

(Side note: I'm looking for someone who attended the Public Performance Measurement Reporting Network conference this past weekend to share a few words on this blog about the highlights of the conversations. If you're interested, e-mail me.)

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Happiness, Gender, and Statistics

Over the past month or so, there's been a series of articles in the traditional media and the blogosphere about a couple of papers suggesting a "happiness gap" between men and women. I won't re-hash the arguments, though I will link to some of the more interesting articles at the end of this post. What is of interest, I suspect, to community indicators practioners is the potential pitfalls in telling stories with data.

The controversy began with this New York Times article that attempted to tell the stories behind this article (PDF) and this one. It quickly spread to a couple of my favorite blogs, Language Log (for those of you who like linguistics) and the Freakonomics blog (for those who, like me, are easily amused by data.)

The core of the issue is that a small change in a trend line led to some strong statements generalized about the relative quality of life of men and women in America. There might be a need to make such statements, and the statements might in and of themselves be true (note how carefully I'm weaseling out of this particular debate in hopes of maintaining some sort of personal happiness!) The problem was, however, that the neither the data nor the trend lines appear to support such sweeping generalizations. Here's the lesson learned.

In 1999, we did some work locally on adult literacy. In that report, we used some synthetic estimates of adult functional literacy developed by Stephen Reder using a comparison between the 1990 Census and the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) conducted at the same time. Using those two sources, and finding the correlations between the NALS scores and Census responses, he could estimate adult functional literacy rates for every county in the United States. So as part of our project, we duly reported that an estimated 47 out of every 100 adults in our county could not read, write, and perform math skills at a 10th-grade level in 1990. (This was better than the state average, which had 51 out of 100 adults at levels 1 or 2 on a five-point functional literacy scale, meaning they had functional literacy problems.)

You'd have thought the sky fell in. For the next six years, our "horrific adult illiteracy" was the talk of the town, and that $%^&$#! 47 percent number was used to mean anything the speaker wanted it to. We did have a problem in preparing our workforce for higher literacy skills. We just didn't have the kind of sky-is-falling problem that started showing up in the media over and over again.

The moral of this story that I learned is to be careful telling stories with data. You want to draw community attention to a problem. You don't want to overstate or exaggerate the problem, however. That's when the data start to lose truthfulness and become less helpful in making community decisions or setting priorities.

That was our story with literacy. Here's a new story on happiness and gender, and I suspect the same lesson applies. I think you'll enjoy reading these -- the first two are the technical articles, and the rest are reactions and story telling.

Mark Liberman provides a timeline of articles here that I thought you might appreciate:

• 8/23/2007: Alan B. Krueger, "Are We Having More Fun Yet? Categorizing and Evaluating Changes in Time Allocation", ms. (Princeton U. and NBER).
• 9/16/2007: Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness", ms. (University of Pennsylvania).
• 9/26/2007: David Leonhardt, "He's Happier, She's Less So", NYT.
• 9/26/2007: Jezebel, "Women Less Happy Than Men About Performing Every Single One Of Those Multi Tasks".
• 9/26/2007: digg.com, " Men Are Now Happier Than Women".
• 9/26/2007: Mark Liberman, "The 'happiness gap' and the rhetoric of of statistics", Language Log.
• 9/27/2007: Mark Liberman, "Gender-role resentment and rorschach-blot news reporting", Language Log.
• 10/1/2007: Steven D. Levitt, "Why Are Women So Unhappy?", Freakonomics Blog (NYT).
• 10/1/2007: Mark Liberman, "Why are economists so misleading?", Language Log.
• 10/2/2007: Jill Filipovic, "Feminists made their bed, now they have to lie in it alone with their cats", Feministe.
• 10/2/2007: Amanda Marcotte, "Women: Not really that unhappy avoiding scowling cretins and petting cats", Pandagon.
• 10/2/2007: Justin Wolfers, "The Significance of Changes in the Gender Happiness Gap", Marginal Revolution.
• 10/3/2007: Echidne, "The Gender Happiness Gap", Echidne of the Snakes.
• 10/2/2007: Jezebel, "Women Have Gotten Less happy, I'll Take My Graphing Calculator Out And Prove It".
• 10/3/2007: Justin Wolfers, "The Real Significance of Changes in the Gender Happiness Gap", Marginal Revolution.
• 10/3/2007: Steven D. Levitt, "The Debate on Female Happiness Heats Up", Freakonomics.

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Happiness, Quality of Life, and What We Measure

We've been discussing happiness and economic prosperity and the different kinds of happiness and misery indicators we could be measuring. Now Newsweek explains why money doesn't buy happiness and sets up an interesting question for community indicators practitioners.

First of all, the research suggests that happiness buys money, but not the other way around.

The True Ancestor blog puts it this way:

... [In] Stumbling on Happiness, [Harvard psychologist Daniel] Gilbert notes that "wealth increases human happiness when it lifts people out of abject poverty and into the middle class but that it does little to increase happiness thereafter."

The Gross Domestic Product in the U.S. has nearly tripled since World War II, ... but people's sense of well-being has stayed virtually unchanged. Economic indicators turn out not to be such good predictors of happiness.

Interestingly, young people who are happy go on to earn more throughout their lives than do their unhappier counterparts. No chicken-and-the-egg conundrum here: the chicken that is happiness lays the golden egg that is economic well-being.

With the upcoming international forum on gross national happiness coming up, the question of why we're measuring what we're measuring is an interesting one. Legendary indicators guru David Swain frames the issue this way:

What intrigues me the most about the comparison of QOL [Quality of Life] and GNH [Gross National Happiness] concepts of measuring is the difference in the understanding of “happiness.” As I’m coming to understand it, in Western QOL thinking, from a community/national perspective, happiness is concerned with matters “external” to the human mind/spirit. Business oriented marketing/happiness measurement is concerned primarily with material goods and services, what people want and will buy. Community oriented quality of life issues are concerned with what groups of people can do collectively to improve the external environment, excluding “internal” issues such as faith and spirituality. Again, as I’m coming to understand, Eastern, specifically Buddhist GNH thinking makes no such distinction between external and internal, between material and spiritual. So, measures of happiness are defined quite differently.

Many, if not all, of our community indicators reports measure economic indicators. Sustainability efforts describe the intersection of people, place and prosperity (or economy, environment and equity or whatever the latest alliterative formulation might be with a Venn diagram thrown in). But while we keep getting more and more creative in our development of measurements of the external environments, few (if any) community-level indicators reports seek to measure happiness.

Is that by design, or oversight? How would you respond?

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