The Best Starts for Kids Health Survey (BSKHS) is a critical tool we use to better understand the health needs of babies, young children, and their families in King County.
The survey will be distributed to thousands of King County families to gather information about young children’s well-being, strengths, and needs including topics such as community supports, child care access, and parent-child-connection.
We’re excited to announce that the Social Development Research Group (SDRG) with the University of Washington will be collecting the data for the BSKHS.
In a statement the SDRG team shared: “The Survey Research Division, which has a 25-year track record of providing high-quality survey research services, will collect data as part of the evaluation of the initiative in 2023, with possible contract extensions in 2025 and 2027. We are proud to participate in this important work in our home county.” You can read more from SDRG on their blog post here.
Background
In the past the Best Starts for Kids Health Survey has highlighted the experiences of families to inform how Best Starts built up our programming. It’s designed to reach families who reflect King County’s multicultural communities across all zip codes: including people who are Black, Brown, Indigenous, and people of color, multilingual families, people of all gender identities, and people with different abilities. This helps our team identify opportunities that meet the needs of all young people in King County.
As the pandemic hit, the BSKHS captured the challenges families were facing through the pandemic and the opportunities our community had to build equitable supports together. Families who responded to the survey pointed to child care and mental health supports as increasingly critical needs. They shared that children need additional resources to support their social-emotional development, that remote learning created challenges especially for younger children and children with disabilities, that women were hit harder by the stressors of COVID due to disproportionate responsibilities for child care, and that government-funded supports provided essential assistance to families.
You can explore data from past Best Starts for Kids Health Surveys here.
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