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Integrating Federal Statistics on Children
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Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Brett Brown, Greg Duncan, and Kristin Moore addressed the issue of improving national data to facilitate policy making for children and youth. Datasets must have reliable and, if possible, longi- tudinal assessments of child outcomes and measures should be age- and development-specific, the authors note. Sets of child supplements offer one approach to capturing such information. Assessments should cover as many of the crucial domains of child and adolescent development as possible, given a limited interview period. It may be best to link the timing of assessments to what is known regarding time frames of stability and change, e.g., family income. Since resources, broadly conceived, are instrumental in promoting or retarding development, a high-quality, longitudinal measurement of family income, by source of income as well as amount, is crucial for testing re- source-based theories of child and adolescent development, the authors note. In addition, time resources, especially parents’ time spent with children, are typically neglected or not measured well, although they are crucial resources. Measures of other family process mediators are needed to understand the ways in which resources affect child development. Datasets should include information from as many sources as possible, since resources can come from the neighborhood, the school, and the community, as well as the fam- ily. In addition to resources, it is important that data collection allows for the development of dynamic measures of family structure, especially since the changing structure of American families is likely to have a large impact on children and adolescents.
0-309-52063-0
NONE
Management
English
1995
1-227
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