Understanding and Improving Evidence-based Decision-Making: Local Needs and Opportunities among Early Childhood Leaders

• In Event: Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Topic - Social Policy

Abstract

The increasingly complex needs of families with young children are pressing executive leaders to more effectively identify gaps and allocate resources. Recommendations from the bipartisan Evidence-Based Policymaking Commission include increasing access to and use of available data, including nationally collected resources like American Community Survey or Kids Count as well as state-based administrative data systems. Unfortunately, little is known about how to translate this charge at the local level for community leaders. The purpose of this study was to understand the current capacity of local early childhood leaders to find and use relevant data for community needs assessments and strategic plans for program coordination and service improvement.
Early Childhood Iowa (ECI) is a legislatively governed alliance charged with improving collaboration among public and private systems serving young children, birth through age five, and their families. It also funds local directors from 38 geographically distributed areas to support cross-systems coordination and distribute state-allocated resources to address service gaps and needs in all of Iowa’s 99 counties. The current mixed methods study included surveys and interviews with directors to understand how they use data and identify needs for fully actualizing an evidence-based decision-making approach to community planning. Two surveys were conducted at the conclusion of half day workshops including discussion about state and local data. Structured interviews were conducted with a subset of directors to ask more in-depth questions about how data are (or are not) typically used in community planning, challenges with data access and understanding, and areas of support they need to advance evidence-based decision-making.
Survey results revealed that while 100% of participants felt that data were valuable and they would like to use it for community planning, only 44% felt comfortable communicating about data with their stakeholders or using it to inform decision-making. The top three needs identified were more time for discussion, help using data-informed approaches, and training in data literacy (e.g., understanding basic statistics, graphics, tables).
Eight semi-structed interviews were conducted using a qualitative action research method. Using purposeful sampling, the target population included a range of rural, semi-rural and urban communities. Findings corroborated and extended results from the surveys by highlighting three needs: more collaboration, understanding local trends data, and access to data and data platform/formatting. Very few interviewees reported confidence in either analyzing data or speaking about data to others, and pointed to a need for more discussion and training. Directors found online data sources confusing and hard to replicate when trying to compare results from one year to the next in their community planning. They also expressed challenges unique to rural areas, where many national tools are limited by small local samples sizes.
These results provided an actionable baseline for developing structured supports to improve evidence-based decision-making for local leaders. The partnership between ECI and university colleagues is currently using these findings to develop a literacy training sequence to address gaps and advance a data culture among community leaders.

Authors

• Allison M Gress, Iowa State University
  Presenting Author

• Heather L. Rouse, Iowa State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Amanda Winslow, Early Childhood Iowa
  Non-Presenting Author