The search for living conditions data.
This is an aside from ‘We found no data about living conditions at orphanages.’
I’m looking for data about quality of life at orphanages and foster care institutions. Specifically, I’m looking for: Nutritional metrics, availability of educational resources, health and hygiene stats, and some answers to some questions about funding: ‘How much is being spent per child?’, ‘What part of funding is from individuals, as opposed to organizations’, and ‘What’s the support from the state?’
I split my search: Google, and some specific organizations that I assumed would have the data we needed.
I searched for combinations of the following keywords: Orphanage, Charity, Foster care, NGO along with terms data, statistics, metrics. I chose results from India, and also appended India as a keyword.
In addition to that, I appended these keywords one at a time: nutrition, education, funding, government support, hygiene, health
I limited my search till the second page of search results in each case.
Organizations
I also searched these websites: data.gov.in, ourworldindata.org, data.unicef.org.
I used the inbuilt search on these websites, and also a site specific search on Google using similar terms as in the last section.
What we found
Here’s everything we found in a spreadsheet.
We didn’t find what we were looking for. None of the articles, studies, or datasets we happened upon in our search could be used to assess and compare living conditions in orphanages and in foster care institutions at a large scale.
There were articles and studies about negative metrics. There were some grueling case studies. One showed that kids at orphanages were more likely to be malnourished. One was about bad socialization. And there were quite a few case studies regarding AIDS.
But case studies are just that—case studies. I couldn’t find an evaluation of living conditions at orphanages on a larger scale. Some papers I stumbled upon included indicators for trauma and bereavement. One included a survey asking for some of the metrics we are interested in, but sadly, the study was of a limited scope.
It appears that the required tools exist, but there’s no comprehensive project to use them to collect data at a larger scale.
Main article: ‘We found no data about living conditions at orphanages’
