The "Keeping Score" on Kids in Hamilton Reporting Project

What is a Social Report?

Generally speaking, a social report is a document discussing what we know about the ‘social conditions’ of a particular population, community, or society of human beings. Social reports focus on entire populations or communities, however defined, and they are most clearly contrasted with studies which are based on a clinical population. A social report should thus be contrasted with research work which seeks to explore, test, and refine hypotheses, theoretical models, and correlations, but which does not seek to draw conclusions about the state of a particular population or society. In its fullest form, a social report brings together statistics, research findings, analysis, interpretation, and forecasting and prediction, about the nature and state of a population or community. Social reports draw their data from a variety of sources, such as registries, administrative files, certain epidemiological studies, censuses, and from representative sample surveys.

It is thought that social reports are important to the communities they are written about and that the information they present play a role in facilitating community change processes. For example, a community health status report can provide social and health status information that can help communities to identify issues that require community attention. Social reports are purported to have several functions or uses including inspirational, mobilizing, sensitizing, educational, evaluative, problem-solving, performance monitoring, agenda setting, advocacy, political or tactical, and background resource use.¹

Why are local-level social reports important?

As citizens of Canada, we all live in a nation and in a province or territory, and information on how we are doing as a national or provincial population serves important purposes. But we all live in local communities and neighbourhoods as well. The factors that immediately surround and influence how well children, youth, and families are doing exist in particular at the local community level. Parents raise their children in their local communities, and children grow, learn, and form their vision of themselves, their opportunities, and the world, in their own local setting. Each community is different, and even within the same municipality there are often strong differences between different areas.

While a national or provincial social report will provide information that in scope and content is pertinent to the kinds of decisions being made by national/provincial organizations, it is often not very useful to apply information from such higher-level reports to lower-level jurisdictions. The main problem with doing this is that important differences between local areas and the larger jurisdiction will not be properly captured on such higher-level social reports. For example, knowing the teen pregnancy rate for all of Canada may be a useful piece of information for national agenda-setting, but it yields little useful information for those concerned with an individual community and who need to know the relevant rates for that particular setting. It is precisely this latter kind of social information that would most help give focus to the efforts of citizens, community groups, and organizations in supporting young people and families. In fact, for many purposes at the community level, only community-level data will serve.

The general purpose of any community-level social reporting is that it will provide some of the necessary information that communities need in working to improve the lot of children and youth by helping the communities to build on identified areas of strengths and to address in appropriate ways identified areas of deficit and weakness. Community-level social reporting can do this by providing the necessary particular information that also has sufficient precision to focus and strengthen such community efforts. Despite the continually shifting roles of the various administrative levels in Canada and Ontario, it is still the case that the community and its various components (such as municipal planning departments, district health councils and public health departments, community advocacy groups, parent councils, sports organizations, faith-based organizations, etc.) remain as powerful units of intervention with regard to the healthy development of children and youth. And while funding streams and policy formation often initiate at national, provincial, and regional levels, many critical decisions concerning practice and the implementation of policy, as well as advocacy efforts, occur at the community/municipal level.

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), p. 52.