CRCF Brownbag Blog

Bruno Martorano (UNICEF/Innocenti) presented a paper at the ICSI Conference titled Child Well-being in Economically Rich Countries.
Many of the figures employ a simple scatterplot with report card 7 on x axis and report card 11 on the y axis. The scores are standardized and represent distance from the mean in sd units. I have never seen this strategy for showing change over time. Curious what caused Canada to be almost 2 sds below mean for report card 11 (p. 15).

I’ve just finished the International Society for Child Indicators conference in Seoul. One thing is clear: it’s a good time to be a child well-being researcher. Never before has there been so much high quality data made available by various international groups. And this trend will only increase in the future. This reality makes it possible to investigate many policy-relevant questions across the globe without leaving campus.
But this trend raises several questions/cocerns. Foremost is the real risk that data availability will drive the research enterprise rather than carefully constructed, theory-developing research questions.

Some of the new databases I learned about from the conference are presented below.

* International Survey of Children’s Well-being aka ChildrensWorlds project
* Save the Children data project in progress
* World Family Map Project
* Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey
* European Statistics on Income and Living Conditions
* Multiple Indicator Child Survey from UNICEF
* Child Trends Databank
* Health Behavior in School Aged Children
* Children’s Chances