Minority Health and Health Equity Archive

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/21769

Welcome to the Minority Health and Health Equity Archive (MHHEA), an electronic archive for digital resource materials in the fields of minority health and health disparities research and policy. It is offered as a no-charge resource to the public, academic scholars and health science researchers interested in the elimination of racial and ethnic health disparities.

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Subject: search.filters.subject.Making Connections

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    Housing assistance in Making Connections neighborhoods
    (2008) Kingsley, G. Thomas; Hayes, Christopher
    Making Connections is a decade-long initiative of the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s based on the belief that the best way to improve outcomes for vulnerable children living in tough neighborhoods is to strengthen their families’ connections to economic opportunity, positive social networks, and effective services and supports. Launched in 1999, the initiative operates in selected neighborhoods in ten cities across the country. This brief examines the scope and composition of housing assistance being provided through HUD programs to residents of the ten Making Connections neighborhoods. It also describes selected characteristics of the families that receive housing assistance and how their circumstances changed between surveys conducted in 2002/03 and 2005/06. At the latter date, the average share of eligible households that received assistance was 25 percent, the same as the national average, but there was considerable variation across sites: 46 percent of eligibles were assisted in Hartford and Louisville compared to only 13 percent or fewer in Des Moines, Indianapolis and Milwaukee. Among families with children, characteristics of housing assistance recipients contrasted markedly with those of other renters living in these neighborhoods. Assisted families were much more likely to be minorities and single parent households, had much lower incomes, and were considerably less likely to have a family member with stable employment or a savings account, although differences in factors like volunteering, satisfaction with services and optimism about the future of their neighborhood were less marked. Both groups had about the same, surprisingly high, likelihood of having moved between surveys (68-69 percent), and the distances moved were also similar. When designing approaches to helping both groups advance toward self-sufficiency, the major differences in their characteristics suggest alternative approaches and should certainly be taken into account.
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    Data Quality in the Retrospective Reporting of Addresses
    (2010) Bachtell, Kate; Tangel, Virginia; Latterner, Michael; English, Ned; Haggerty, Catherine
    While tracking the movement of respondents has always been crucial for panel studies, the increasing popularity of geographic analyses has furthered the demand for both accurate and systematic address collection. This paper advances the existing literature on retrospective reporting in surveys by focusing on the collection of respondents‘ past addresses. It features data from the third wave of Making Connections, a ten-year, neighborhood-based survey funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The wave three questionnaire featured a new series that solicited a detailed history of respondents‘ movement during the previous three years. Recovering previous addresses presented challenges beyond those typically associated with the systematic recording of physical addresses because recalling information from the past is inevitably more difficult than describing the present (Kennickell and Starr-McCluer 1997). We designed an experiment to test different methods of maximizing data quality in the retrospective address series collected in 2009 in White Center (Seattle), Washington. Households were randomly assigned to two treatment groups. Addresses collected from the first group underwent administrative data cleaning (using Google Maps, etc.) while those in the second group received intensive follow-up calls by a team of field interviewers and managers. We compare the results of these treatments to the original data collected in White Center and investigate the efficacy of each method for producing addresses that can be successfully translated into geographic coordinates for spatial analyses. We find that the retrieval effort – while more costly to execute – was far more successful in returning ‗geocodable‘ addresses. This supports the argument that successful collection of retrospective addresses depends on an interactive process between the interviewer and respondent involving a variety of probing techniques. Our findings may inform improved methodologies for collecting retrospective data in both panel and cross-sectional surveys.