The Poverty Center’s ChildHood Integrated Longitudinal Data (CHILD) system is a comprehensive integrated data system used to carry out research and evaluation in order to improve child health and wellbeing in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. Our system is nationally recognized as among the oldest and most comprehensive in the country and includes continually updated administrative data from 1989 to the present from 35 administrative systems on more than 640,000 children, for a total of nearly 200 million records in the system. Funding for CHILD comes via grants from Cuyahoga County, the MacArthur Foundation, the City of Cleveland, and others. The CHILD system is used by Poverty Center researchers for research and evaluation of over a dozen projects.
The records imported into the CHILD Data System contain personally identifiable information so that they can be linked across agencies. The records are stored within a secure research environment that meets the highest standards of physical, administrative and technical controls.
No identifiable information is used outside this environment. Only summary statistics and tabulations can be removed, and these are carefully checked for the possibility of deductive re-identification before being released.
Ensuring that these data are used appropriately and ethically and that all data are secure are of utmost importance.
Leveraging Policy and Evaluation: Integrated Data as a Tool
Presentation by Rob Fischer, Ph.D. at Ohio State University