by James A. Bacon
This blog post is geeky, but it’s important — so stick with me! If you favor public policy based on what works as opposed to public policy based on ideology or political muscle, then you should be very encouraged by the progress made by the Virginia Longitudinal Data Survey (VLDS) in incorporating new government data sets.
The VLDS started as a master database of mainly educational and employment data. Now it is adding poverty-related data from the SNAP (food stamp), TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) and VIEW (Virginia Initiative for Employment not Welfare) programs from 2005 to 2014. Coming up: data sets for foster care, child care, child protective services.
Combining all this data will allow researchers to provide more authoritative answers to a host of public policy questions.
For example, writes Jeff Price in a recent VLDS blog post, “We have never been able to evaluate the impact food security, as provided by the SNAP program, has on the academic success of young children. Do children whose family receives food stamps miss fewer days of school and do better on standardized tests than children from other low income families that do not participate in the SNAP program?”
Previously, it was a bureaucratic nightmare for researchers to obtain this data. VLDS eliminates many of the obstacles by anonymizing the data, that is, stripping out personal identifiers. Price continues:
We now have the opportunity to describe the entire population of citizens we serve in ways we never could before. This will provide insight into patterns and relationships we either knew existed but couldn’t quantify, or never knew existed. It will allow agencies to better evaluate their program policies and the approaches and strategies used in the past to determine what works best. In some cases current assumptions will be confirmed. In others prevailing assumptions will be shown to be incorrect.
The value of the VLDS cannot be overstated. For population studies it is a game changer.
Bacon’s bottom line: VLDS has enormous potential. My only beef is that the research conducted so far has addressed extremely narrow-bore topics, and I have yet to see any eye-opening findings. (Click here and scroll down to “VLDS Research” to view the research projects based on VLDS data.) Hopefully, that will change as new data sets are added and researchers are able to address an ever wider array of questions.
