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BOCYF Projects
Integrating Federal Statistics on Children
Publications: Integrating Federal Statistics on Children: Report of a Workshop (1995)
Interest in monitoring and understanding the lives of children has grown rapidly in recent years. Fueled in part by growing pressures to hold public programs accountable for outcomes, as well as by mounting concerns about the instability and apparently worsening problems that characterize the lives of many children, those who shape our nation's child policies are increasingly looking to the federal statistical system for answers to complex questions about the development of children in today's society. At the same time, the nation is contemplating a major shift in responsibility for several major children's programs from the federal to state governments. Such a shift will place even greater demands on the capacity of national data to track and release in a timely fashion information on the effects on children's well-being of this major redirection of public resources.
In this context, the Board on Children and Families (now the Board on Children, Youth, and Families) and the Committee on National Statistics of the National Research Council convened the Workshop on Integrating Federal Statistics on Children in the Spring of 1994. Through a series of background papers, discussants' remarks, and participant discussions, the workshop provided a forum for a preliminary assessment of the strengths and shortcomings of existing and proposed federal statistical data sources, particularly with respect to their capacity to fill the most pressing information needs of those who formulate, implement, and analyze policies for children. Using presentations by the authors of five background papers as a basis, the participants discussed the following subjects:
- Child development in the context of family and community resources
- Children's transitions into school
- Federal data on educational attainment and the transition to work
- The data needs for monitoring health care reform for children and families
- Estimating the incidence, causes, and consequences of interpersonal violence for children and families
A report, Integrating Federal Statistics on Children: Report of a Workshop, was released in 1995.
A more recent project in this area is the Workshop on Longitudinal Surveys of Children, which was held by the Board on Children, Youth, and Families and the Committee on National Statistics in September 1997.
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