Why This Matters

Public benefits agencies, researchers, and advocates often seek to understand more about populations of interest and the challenges these people may face when trying to access services. Public data and simple analytic techniques can allow agencies to easily accomplish this goal. Agencies can use this approach to make decisions about program design and service delivery to ensure they are reaching the people they are trying to serve.

Key Takeaways

To use public data for the goal of understanding more about populations of interest and access challenges, we recommend following these six steps, which we detail in this report:

1. Identify populations and characteristics of interest, along with a geographic level that makes sense for your community’s context.
2. Review available data sources and determine data measures that align with your populations of interest and access challenges.
3. Clean your data and calculate population-adjusted measures for the prevalence of your populations of interest.
4. Analyze and map populations and characteristics of interest individually.
5. Determine the geographic areas with a higher-than-average prevalence across multiple populations and characteristics.
6. Calculate correlations for and create bivariate maps of pairwise comparisons of populations and characteristics.

Many public data sources provide data at the state and county levels you can leverage to undertake similar analyses. In appendix A you can find links to several of these data sources. You can use simple statistical methods in Excel or a statistical software, like R, to conduct these analyses. In appendix C you can find sample R code that you can adapt to your community’s context.

How We Did It

Our research team conducted an analysis of populations of interest for the child care subsidy agency in Georgia. We used publicly available data sources to determine the share of each county’s population that is part of each population of interest and mapped these proportions. We also examined characteristics related to challenges applying for or accessing Georgia’s child care subsidy program. We combined these data and mapped the overlap of the populations of interest and access challenges.

This report describes the process of conducting these analyses and key considerations for other agencies, researchers, and advocates who wish to implement this approach. For examples of the kinds of things you can learn from this approach, see our companion report: Mapping Potential Need for Public Benefits and Access Challenges: A Model Approach Using Publicly Available Data.