Understanding Community Indicators
By Joseph Scariano
This blog post is part of the Massive Data Institute’s Place-Based Indicators Project. Each blog post discusses an aspect of our research and efforts to produce a framework for understanding, evaluating, and developing place-based indicators. To contact us about the project, please email pbi@georgetown.edu.
Everyone relies on indicators to make decisions and to understand the world around them, but not all indicators are created for the same purpose or with the same reliability. In everyday life, individuals might rely on turn-signal indicators to make decisions while driving or check-engine lights to determine their vehicles maintenance needs. A simple discussion reveals differences between these two types of indicators readily. Turn signals indicate one driver’s intentions to the other drivers nearby, while a check-engine light only broadly indicates the maintenance needs of an individual car without informing the car-owner whether the issue is a loose fuel cap, worn spark plugs, or if a more serious issue has triggered the check-engine light. Indicators may be narrow or broad, they may be reliant on a bevy of (good or bad) assumptions, they may be identified as trusted or not trusted, and/or they may rely on faulty data or information.
The Place-Based Indicators Project recognizes the broad category of items captured by the term “indicator” and we have organized this blog post around the following few questions in order to clarify its definition:
- When does a statistic become an indicator?
- What types of indicators exist?
- What does it take for an indicator to be trusted?
When does a statistic become an indicator?
Statistics are descriptive in nature. A statistic becomes an indicator once it is connected to a reference point and a space for comparison is opened up. For example, the National Bureau of Economic Research maintains a list of six indicators it uses to determine whether or not the United States has entered a recession: real personal income, nonfarm payrolls, real personal consumption expenditures, real manufacturing and trade sales, household employment, and an index of industrial production. Nonfarm payrolls, for example, examine the change in total number of individuals on nonfarm payroll month-to-month. Here, a second step in the transformation from statistic to indicator becomes apparent. Indicators rely on assumptions which connect the statistic in question to the phenomenon an indicator is attempting to capture. In this case, the National Bureau of Economic Research utilizes nonfarm payroll as one of several indicators because they believe that changes in nonfarm payroll would indicate whether or not a recession is occuring.
What types of indicators exist?
Much of the discussion above centers around descriptive indicators which are utilized to understand what phenomena are happening and to what extent (i.e. is the economy in recession?). However, these are not the only type of indicators that exist nor are they the only indicators useful for community use. Key performance indicators aim to determine whether or not a policy or organization has met the goals it set for itself. The United Nations, for example, outlined seventeen objectives in its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). One of the targets outlined in the SDGs is universal access to clean drinking water and attached to this goal is the indicator that the United Nations intends to use (proportion of world population using safely managed water services) in order to determine whether or not they have achieved this goal. Indicators tied to evaluating an organization’s ability to meet particular goals are especially important when evaluating the effectiveness of place-based policies in different communities.
Alongside evaluating an organization’s performance, indicators are used for monitoring and determining eligibility. Many environmental indicators are sound examples of indicators created for the purpose of monitoring. The Air Quality Index (AQI) is produced by the federal government in order to inform communities about their local air pollution and quality. In this instance, the government is merely monitoring local environments and reporting that information. Other indicators exist to determine whether a community is eligible to receive funds for federally or state supported programs. The U.S. Department of Commerce includes BroadBandUSA, a host of indicators used to evaluate access to and quality of broadband services across the United States. Included among these indicators is the Anchor Community Eligibility Dashboard which exists solely to inform counties whether or not they qualify for a particular funding opportunity. This non-exhaustive list reveals the breadth of situations that a community may feel the need to have access to reliable and trusted indicators.
What does it take for an indicator to be trusted?
Not all indicators are created equally. The methodology and the input data used to construct an indicator may inspire confidence or despair for a potential user. The ability to create an indicator that utilizes accurate and consistently published data is dependent on access to data sets that are reliable and consistent. The Place-Based Indicators Project has two main goals in regards to increasing access to trusted indicators. The first goal is to increase awareness of existing indicators with trusted data sources — perhaps through the construction of a database that allows users to search for indicators based on certain criteria. The second is to direct attention to the existence of many reliable and consistent data points hidden in government, administrative offices. Through these two goals, we hope to inspire creation of and direct attention to a wealth of information which, when appropriately connected to different phenomena, would allow for communities across the United States to have ready-made access to indicators that inform policy decisions and program evaluations.
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