Bringing the Data Together

Part 5 of our Community Owned Data blog series

This is the fifth and final post in our month-long Community Owned Data series we are doing to highlight our learnings from the Best Starts for Kids Health Survey. If you are interested in the previous posts, we link to them all at the end of this post so make sure you make your way to the end!

Putting it all together

Last week, we shared what we heard from community members about each of the five key topics we discussed. We invite you to dive deeper into their feedback in the interactive visualization further below.

Overall, what we heard from parents broadly confirmed many of the strategies Best Starts is working on with our community partners – which makes sense, given that they were designed based on community input in the first place! Hearing this consistency from our communities helps give us confidence that we are on the right path.

39097784660_9d21766e42_o — Young participants contributing their thoughts at a Data Dive.

For example, the trauma-informed and restorative practices school partnerships will help to create a school culture and climate that honors the unique strengths of young people, which so many parents felt was so badly needed when they looked at data about children thriving. Parents in many data dives talked about the need for support in their parenting and connection to community, which will be supported in our forthcoming parent/caregiver education and support awards.

When you hover over a topic in the data visualization below, you’ll see more information including quotes from data dive participants and a link to Best Starts for Kids Health Survey data. You can also select a group from the menu on the right to learn more about specific communities’ responses.

Click HERE or on the graphic below to explore the data visualization:

Using what we heard

We will also be sharing what we learned in the data dives in our forthcoming series of data briefs, right alongside the numbers. Each brief will focus on a different topic and include context on why it is important for King County families, what the Best Starts for Kids Health Survey results show and how they compare to national survey results, and what the findings mean to parents and caregivers. We currently have two data briefs available:

Stay tuned for more on thriving children and adverse childhood experiences. We will add all briefs here to this blog and the Best Starts website soon.

Our data team also looks forward to incorporating many of the suggestions about the survey – from avoiding words that can be confusing or jargon-y when we talk about results (like “resilience,” for some families) to keeping our partnerships strong throughout the data collection process.

Let your voice be heard!

We’ll be gathering new data through the Best Starts for Kids Health Survey in early 2019. If you are a parent or caregiver of a child in 5^th grade or younger, you may be randomly selected to participate! If you receive an invitation to take the survey, we hope you’ll take a few minutes to do so. Your family’s voices and experiences can help shape the future of Best Starts for Kids, and help us understand how things are going so far.

If you are a member of a community that is not as highly represented in the past Health Survey and speak a language other than English, please let us know if you are interested in engaging your community to participate more in the upcoming Health Survey. You can contact our Community Partnerships Manager, Kerry Wade, at kwade@kingcounty.gov to express your interest. Best Starts is currently building out a new model of community engagement that prioritizes relationships with historically underrepresented communities and you may be a perfect partner!

For more general data thoughts or questions, you can always leave a comment below or reach out directly to the data team at bsk.data@kingcounty.gov. We’d love to hear from you! While we are wrapping up this data blog series (including all previous posts below), there is much more work to be done and we look forward to continuing to explore ways to encourage community ownership of data.

Previous Posts in the Community Owned Data Blog Series