Comparing Community Profiles of Risk, Protection and Outcomes from Parent Reports of Children Ages 0 to 4 and 5 to 8

Introduction: While it is critical to use valid measures of risk and protection to inform prevention efforts in early childhood, assessing representative samples of young children via random household surveys is costly and challenging.  Parent surveys from a defined population with contact information provided by the elementary schools provide a much cheaper and administratively less complex method to estimate community needs. While some have suggested that older risk profiles might be used to approximate need in younger populations, we know of no studies that have examined this assertion empirically. As part of the implementation of Evidence2Success—a new comprehensive prevention system piloted in Providence, RI—we surveyed a representative sample of over 1600 parents of children ages 0 to 8, using a Probability Proportional to Size Cluster Sampling strategy and screening households door-to-door. Parents of these children answered a survey measuring developmental outcomes and risk and protective factors known to affect child wellbeing.

Methods: We use the data from these surveys to compare the profiles of need obtained from the household survey of parents of children ages 0-4 to parents of children ages 5-8.  We investigate the similarities and differences within these subsamples in order to see whether a sample of parents of enrolled students in grades K-3 (ages 5-8) might provide a cheaper method of constructing community profiles of risk, protection and outcomes for the early years.  Because we also have information on public school enrolled students in this community, we can provide information on the coverage of the household sample and the population of parents of children in grades K-3, to answer the question of who is missed using these different data collection methods.

Conclusion: The proposed analyses will allow us to determine whether using parent-report data from young school aged children—which can be collected more efficiently and cost effectively—can adequately be used to inform prevention efforts aimed at infants and preschool aged children.