Hi Survey Girl,
Do you have any recent national data on the assets? The data you have online is from 2003 and a little old. Don’t you think it’s old? We need something more recent to compare to our survey results. Wouldn’t a more recent sample give you better data? Why don’t you have something more recent? Why? Why?
From,
Wonder How You [can do research with old data]
Hi WHY,
Alright, already! Your requests have been heard! The main reason we haven’t done an aggregate data set since 2003 is that the composition of survey customers in a given year and financial and capacity issues have been prohibitive. When we compile a data set, we want to have a good mix of schools and communities—racial, socio-economically, regionally, etc.—and we have not had that in several years. Cleaning and weighting the data is also costly and time-consuming—we want to make sure that the data quality is the best it can be before we commit time and resources to it.
Let’s go back to your email. You stated that you need national data to compare your students to. One reason we do not put comparative data in your survey report is that we want your results to promote local dialogue around setting a community standard for the level of assets you would like to achieve for your youth and prevent local actors from getting hung up on comparisons to other schools or communities.
Another reason is to avoid the interpretation of our aggregate data as “national norms”. Our aggregate data is based on communities who took the Profiles of Student: Attitudes and Behaviors survey during that year and may not be truly representative of national norms.
That said…we’re compiling an aggregate dataset with 2010 data. We’re hoping it will be available within the next few months. I’m assuming that we will report the aggregate asset levels online, like do right now, as well as use them in publications like The Asset Approach
‘til next month,
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