The "Keeping Score" on Kids in Hamilton Reporting Project

The “Keeping Score” on Kids in Hamilton Reporting Project is located at the Offorc Centre for Child Studies in Hamilton, Ontario, and is funded by the Atkinson Foundation and by the Hamilton Community Foundation. The “Keeping Score” on Kids Project involves various community partners (see ‘Acknowledgements’) in an effort to bring together and make available to the community of Hamilton pertinent local and comparative information about its children, youth, and families. This report is based on the premise that many important local and community-level decisions (such as program development and evaluation, networking, policy development, advocacy, funding, and so on) can best be supported by qualitity local information on young people and their families. This report will cover a number of areas of the health and well-being of young people, each section being formatted so that it can serve both as a stand-alone piece and as one part of the larger interconnected document.

The “Keeping Score” on Kids Project has four main objectives:

(1) To produce various Report sections, and to update report sections over time as new data and information become available.

(2) To evaluate the use and impact of this Report in the community of Hamilton. Work on evaluation is proceeding along the lines of a ‘process’ model of research utilization.¹

(3) To work to develop the ‘data environment’ of Hamilton, so as to ensure the effective flow of information in the community.

(4) To set up the Project in such a way that it can be sustained over time as a reporting system in this community or in multiple communities (including Hamilton).

One very important aspect of our communities to which social reports such as the “Keeping Score” on Kids initiative contribute is in the building of what Dan Keating calls “learning societies” - societies that prosper in part because of the circulation within them of various types of knowledge and information, including self-referential knowledge. Keating develops the concept of a ‘learning society’ out of the existing concept of ‘learning organizations’, and indicates that many of the key features are similar: “clear goals; the active participation of all in achieving them; understanding the core dynamics of the system within which the group is operating; continuous improvement based on reliable feedback regarding progress; and effective means for nonjudgemental internal communication and collaboration.”² Keating also states that one of the essential features of a learning society “is the continuous monitoring of the developmental health of its members, a system incorporating this knowledge into policy and planning, both public and private.” He adds that it is “distressing to realize how much more attention is currently paid to monitoring economic performance and environmental impacts than is paid to monitoring human development.”³

Finally, the “Keeping Score” on Kids Project is guided by the following framework⁴ :


This is a basic conceptual framework for developing useful social reports which focus on various community features (e.g., birth outcomes, mental health, etc.). Implementing such a framework produces a very practical social report, one that provides a good deal of the information needed by local organizations and citizens to improve both their knowledge about their community and their capacity to take informed action to support and strengthen the developmental health of their community’s populations. Contained as well within this framework is the notion that social reports need to treat seriously the complexities of the various population features addressed. It is only by gaining such knowledge that we will be less likely to over-simplify issues, and by so doing we will avoid trying to solve problems that are not properly defined.

Footnotes:

1. For more on this, see Feightner, Kathryn, Stakeholder Use of the Keeping Score on Kids in Hamilton-Wentworth Report: A Descriptive and Exploratory Mixed Model Research Protocol, (2002; M.Sc. Thesis, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario), especially Chapter 7 on “Measurement Constructs”.
2. Keating, D., “The Learning Society: A Human Development Agenda”, in Developmental Health and the Wealth of Nations, (eds.) Keating, D. & Hertzman, C., (The Guilford Press, New York; 1999), pp. 238-9.
3. Ibid, pp. 249-50.
4. Adapted from Offord, D.R., et al, “Lowering the Burden of Suffering: Monitoring the Benefits of Clinical, Targeted, and Universal Approaches”, in Developmental Health and the Wealth of Nations, (eds.) Keating, D. & Hertzman, C., (The Guilford Press, New York; 1999), pp. 308-9.