For 16 years, the Annie E. Casey Foundation has published an annual KIDS COUNT Data Book that uses data to measure child well-being in America. Now the foundation has published the entire contents of the book online (www.kidscount.org), making it far more valuable to journalists.
The site is packed with lots of data about children and families and is a great source of story ideas. It makes it easy to find national statistics about children and compare states and counties to one another.
Among the things you can do with the online version: create custom graphs, maps, ranked lists, and profiles for a specific state by looking at measures related to education, employment and income, health, population and family characteristics, poverty and youth risk factors. The site includes data from all 50 states, as well as D.C., Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The Casey Foundation also offers county-level data via its CLIKS (Community-Level Information on Kids) site, at http://www.aecf.org/cgi-bin/cliks.cgi.
Kids Count is a national and state-by-state effort to track the status of children in the United States. When using the data, keep in mind that the project has an agenda — albeit a noble one, helping kids — so some of the data may have been chosen toward that end.
The online data book allows you to check a box to show the sources for all of the statistics, so that you can verify the information and find more detailed data when you need to. I recommend using this feature (found in the left column of the data pages) and, when appropriate, tracking down the original sources so you can learn more about the specific studies (such as how many people may have been included in the study, etc.).
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