Guidance for Users Regarding the Early Childhood Community Profiles

Early Childhood Community Profiles have been created for each community participating in Discovery or the Connecticut/Memorial Fund Partnership Community Planning Grant program.

The profile serves as a starting point for examining relevant data about the status of your community’s young children. These profiles also include planning questions that will help you dig deeper into the meaning of the data and search for other relevant information.

Here are some things to keep in mind:

1. Use your local experts to understand the meaning of the data, before drawing conclusions.
2. The data are from a variety of sources at the statewide level and may be calculated differently than data collected at the local level.
3. These data are the latest available and the year varies from indicator to indicator. Check the reference page for the date. In most cases, the data are presented for a single year, but for a few indicators they represent a point in time or a combination of several years.
4. Be careful about overstating a percentage if the numbers are small. This is true when either the occurrence (numerator, or number representing how many or how often) or the population (denominator, or number representing how many are in the pool under consideration) is very small. Small communities need to be especially cautious.
5. Look at several years of data to detect trends and determine if the last year reported is representative.
6. Comparisons to other communities, or state or national rates, or against a standard, put the data in context.
7. REMEMBER, THIS IS A STARTING POINT FOR YOUR DATA EXPLORATION.