No Data about Us without Us: Collaborative Interpretation of the Best Starts for Kids Health Survey

This presentation was part of the NNIP Showcase, Part 3 session at the October 2018 NNIP Partners’ Meeting. 

These 5-minute presentations give a lightning-quick overview of our NNIP Partners and their work.

Best Starts for Kids (BSK) is an initiative to improve the health and wellbeing of King County, WA by investing in prevention and early intervention for children, youth, families, and communities. The Best Starts for Kids Health Survey helps assess needs and evaluate impacts on children and families, including providing data for many of the initiative’s headline indicators. Public Health Seattle-King County turned to community partners to drive interpretation of survey results through participatory “data dives.” They held data dives on communities who are less likely to see themselves represented in other population-based data, including Latino, Black/African-American, Somali, Vietnamese, Chinese, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, American Indian/Alaska Native, and LGBTQ parents. They partnered with and supported local community leaders to host culturally and linguistically-specific data dives to review data placemats on key issues with analyses tailored to their communities. Families were engaged in the data, asked many questions about data collection and results, and shared their understanding of data in relationship to their lived experiences. This interpretation has helped to better understand the meaning and limitations of their data and improve the survey for the second round of data collection; has been included in their data briefs; and was shared through blog posts and an interactive visualization.