Redesigned 2023 Youth Survey Report is Now Available
Each year, we publish the results and our analysis from the Cortland Youth Survey. The Cortland Youth Survey is an anonymous, confidential survey of school climate, youth wellness and resiliency administered to 7th -12th grade students in Cortland County. With the 2023-2024 school year, RHI worked with a consultant to develop a new survey, that asked questions about a broader range of health-related factors. You can read more about why and how we transformed the survey into a more general, whole-health surveillance tool here on our website.
You can read the full 2023 Youth Survey report by clicking the button below, and you can also access all of our reports on the Portal.
Data accessibility is about more than just making datasets publicly available
The Youth Survey has been a core part of our agency’s work since the beginning. Over that time, we’ve worked to expand the data collection infrastructure to better understand our community’s evolving needs. While our data has been used in countless projects and grants—by us and by partners—it hasn’t always been accessible to everyone.
Truly accessible data is meaningful and actionable. By that definition, our data has only been truly accessible to a small subset of our partners, and an even smaller subset of our community. We wanted to change that, so that anyone who wants to understand or use our data can.
Centering data accessibility meant rethinking how we talk about data
As we launch this new Youth Survey and as we transition from CACTC into RHI, we wanted to take the time to design a new approach to data communication. We want our reports to do multiple things. Some of these are obvious: they should clearly lay out our findings and analyses. We want our reports to be actionable, and to firmly tie the data to concrete things happening in our community. Too often, data ends up being numbers abstracted from day-to-day life, and we want to humanize our numbers.
Other things we want our reports to do are maybe less obvious, or at the very least less traditional. For instance, we want our reports to help build data literacy. That is, we want our reports to not only communicate data in an accessible way, but we want them to have the explanatory context and commentary to help people who might not “speak data” still get something out of the document. As we point out emerging gaps, disparities, and target populations, we also want to highlight the important work that community partners have done and continue to do to support our youth.
This year’s report represents a new kind of collaborative effort for RHI
As a public health institute, we have three interrelated areas of expertise that we use to help bolster our partners’ capacity and support the communities we work with:
Data + Epidemiology
Administrative + Collaborative Leadership
Design + Health Communications
In our day-to-day work, we move back and forth between these areas constantly, as they inform and support each other. Even when we have staff who specialize in one of these areas, like Claudia, our Graphic Designer, or Summer, one of our Epidemiologists, the work is not siloed. We work together as a team to build off of each other’s skills, knowledge, and experience.
To accomplish the various goals we have for these reports, we decided to work more collaboratively on the document, using the expertise and skills of multiple staff members across our three areas of expertise to produce a report that, we hope, better does what we want it to. We realized that we have staff with significant design experience and with science communication training, and that using those to be more intentional about how we share our data and recommendations aligns with our broader understanding of our work and our role in the community.
We kept asking ourselves: “Who is our audience?” and “What are the main take-aways?”
The people who made this report what it is are Summer Barrows, Claudia Kolts, Matt Whitman, and Aster Parrott (you can read more about our team here). We wanted this version of the report to better reflect our collective skills: to show off Claudia’s thoughtful art, to use Aster’s teaching and communication training to make Summer’s data and analysis more accessible and meaningful to more people. Matt’s creative vision of the RHI visual style and his data literacy goals for the agency shaped all our work over six months of experimentation and revision.
Summer did the work they do every year of processing and analyzing the large and complex dataset that the survey produces, drafting a thorough and nuanced narrative report, as well as charts and tables to better communicate the important survey findings.
Together, we all talked through Summer’s analysis, discussing what the most important findings were, possible areas for confusion, how partners might use our data, and how best to communicate these things while helping build data literacy (the capacity to understand and use data). Aster wrote sections to add additional context and highlight the work our partners are doing. Matt and Claudia led Aster through the design process, as it learned Adobe InDesign and the basics of text layout to build this document.
We included several design and content elements to make the findings and recommendations more meaningful to more people
We planned “callout boxes” throughout the report to add context to the main body text or to highlight specific strategies or research that was relevant but not crucial to understanding the analysis. We include a glossary that details how we create each of the variables, making the data analysis more transparent. We intentionally designed our charts and figures to simultaneously be easy to read and to highlight important elements of the data or trends.
In this figure, we chose the sequence of indicators (depressive symptoms, then suicide ideation, then suicide attempts) to reflect both the trends (depressive symptoms were reported at higher rates than the others) and the progression that actually happens (most people experience a lead up of depressive symptoms prior to suicide ideation or attempts).
We thought about narrative structure—telling a story—when we laid out each section. The three main sections—frame around the categories of ACEs, mental health, and substance use—each start with big-picture main points. Then we discuss the survey findings, which articulate the main areas of success and concern within that category. Finally, each section ends with practical recommendations based on our expertise, best-practice research, and what’s already happening locally. Even then, each recommendation is a micro-narrative that ties together the data (“what are we seeing?”), the research (“what can we do?”), and current work (“what are we doing?”).
This is the Recommendations page of the Substance Use section. You can see the three blue boxes highlight evidence-based strategies to respond to specific kinds of needs, and we highlight the work that we and partners are doing to work implement those strategies.
Throughout the report, we link to other parts of the document, partner agency websites, and other resources. We hope that this reduces barriers to learning more about the topics and about local agencies. We include an executive summary that pulls the most important and actionable findings from each section into four pages that can stand alone as a broad overview. The report also has a section on how to understand and use youth survey data, which addresses common misconceptions (e.g. that self-reported data is unreliable) and explains the limits of what we can say with this data collection tool.
Moving forward, we plan to design all future reports like this, so that we can build our collective capacity to find, understand, and use local data
We hope that this document helps more clearly identify priorities for Cortland, but we also hope that it does a better job of promoting the good work happening, appreciating the skills and expertise of our staff, and making the data we collect more meaningful to more of the community. The final product could not have happened without our team working, deliberating, learning, growing, and, honestly, having fun together. We hope to use what we’ve learned—as well as our staff members’ various skills and expertise—to continue supporting our partners and our community.
