Indicators of Well-Being for California's Children
PRB works with the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health to support the Kidsdata project, which promotes the health and well-being of children in California by making information about their well-being easily accessible.
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Areas of Expertise
- Children, Youth, and Families
- The U.S. Census and Public Data
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Regions
- Northern America
The Challenge
Advocates and community members need evidence-based resources to support their efforts to advance children’s well-being in California.
The Kidsdata project makes data on the health and well-being of California’s children accessible to policymakers, service providers, grant seekers, media, parents, and others who influence children’s lives. The project provides context that distills key research and works with the user community to empower advocates and community members by providing them with resources they can use.
Our Approach
We collect current and historical data for more than 300 indicators of child well-being, from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, California state agencies, health surveys (such as the California Health Interview Survey and National Survey of Children’s Health), and other sources. PRB has also developed innovative estimation methods to improve data coverage on child health topics. Data are provided for California’s counties, school districts, state legislative districts, and cities. In addition to data and analytical support, PRB partners with the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health (LPFCH) on webinars, blog posts, technical assistance to journalists, and analytical support for oversampling work to improve the quality of data about child health in California.
Impact
PRB, LPFCH, and The Children’s Partnership partnered on an analysis of the implications for child health of changes to the Public Charge Rule. Through this analysis we found that nearly 180,000 noncitizen children in California would be at direct risk of losing their health insurance coverage—mostly Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP)—under the revised rule. An additional 1.6 million citizen children of noncitizen parents in California could also be at risk. Learn more.
LPFCH worked with PRB to analyze trends in public health insurance (such as Medicaid and CHIP) among children in California. Through this analysis, we discovered that in 2015 and 2016, seven in 10 children in California participated in Medicaid or CHIP, either temporarily or year-round. LPFCH wrote an advisory about the data, which sparked discussion of children’s health insurance among state legislators. Learn more.