Metric Glossary
Published: Aug. 15, 2022
Prepared by: Rachell Calhoun, David Coe, Liz Giancola, Lauren Wolf
Below are the metrics used in this project, their descriptions, sources, and any extra notes that might exists. Because this project used the framework presented in the research report Boosting Upward Mobility: Metrics to Inform Local Action, the metrics as well as some descriptions were modeled from this report.
Strong and Healthy Families
Financial Wellbeing
Income
- Metric: Household income at 20th, 50th, and 80th percentiles
- Description: This set of measures reflects financial resources available to low, middle, and high-income households as well as the extent of income inequality.
- Source: American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year data, 2019
Financial security
- Metric: Share of households with debt in collections
- Description: The measure accounts for the share of households in an area with debt that has progressed from being past due to being in collections.
- Source: Alexander Carther, Kassandra Martinchek, Breno Braga, Signe-Mary McKernan, and Caleb Quakenbush. 2021. Debt in America 2022. Accessible from https://datacatalog.urban.org/dataset/debt-america-2022
Housing
Housing instability and homelessness
- Metric: Portion of public-school children who are ever homeless during the school year
- Description: The number homeless is based on the number of children (age 3 through 12th grade) who are enrolled in public schools and whose primary nighttime residence at any time during a school year was a shelter, transitional housing, or awaiting foster care placement; unsheltered (e.g., a car, park, campground, temporary trailer, or abandoned building); a hotel or motel because of the lack of alternative adequate accommodations; or in housing of other people because of loss of housing, economic hardship, or a similar reason. The share is the percent of all public school students in those schools experiencing homelessness.
- Source: US Department of Education via EdFacts Homeless Students Enrolled 2018-2019 School Year
Health
Access to and utilization of health services
- Metric: Health Professional Shortage Area ranking for primary care providers
- Description: The Health Resources & Services Administration designates an area as having a shortage of Primary Care providers for an entire group of people within a defined geographic area and indicates the severity of the shortage with the HPSA Score using values from 0 to 25, where higher scores indicate a greater shortage.
- Source: Health Resources & Services Administration
- Notes: “Designated” and “Proposed For Withdrawal” were used to indicate currently having a health shortage for the category of “Geographical” shortage for each county.
Neonatal Health
- Metric: Share of low-weight births
- Description: The proportion of babies born weighing less than 5 pounds 8 ounces (<2,500 grams) out of all births
- Source: National Vital Statistics System, Natality on CDC WONDER, Natality public use data 2019
Supportive Communities
Local Governance
Political participation
- Metric: Share of the voting eligible population who turn out to vote
- Description: This measures the share of the voting-eligible population who voted in the 2020 presidential election.
- Source: MIT Election Data and Science Lab for 2020 Election pulled from the Harvard Dataverse and American Community Survey 2020 5-year data.
- MIT Election Data and Science Lab, 2022, "U.S. President Precinct-Level Returns 2020", https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JXPREB, Harvard Dataverse, V1
Neighborhoods
Economic inclusion
- Metric: Share of residents experiencing poverty living in high-poverty neighborhoods
- Source: American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year data, 2019
- Description: A neighborhood is defined as a census tract. A high-poverty neighborhood is one in which over 40 percent of the residents are experiencing poverty.
Racial Diversity
- Metric: Neighborhood exposure index, or share of a person’s neighbors who are people of other races and ethnicities
- Description: This is a set of metrics constructed separately for each racial/ethnic group and reports the average share of that group's neighbors who are members of other racial/ethnic groups. This is a type of exposure index. For example, an exposure index of 80% in “Hispanic or Latino“' means that the average Hispanic or Latino resident has 80% of their neighbors within a census tract who have a different ethnicity than them. The higher the value, the more exposed to people of different races/ethnicities. The exposure index was calculated using the Census Scope Exposure Index Formula for each race at the tract level.
- Source: ACS 5-year data, 2019
Transportation access
- Metric: Transit trips index
- Description: This metric reflects the number of public transit trips taken annually by a three-person single-parent family with income at 50 percent of the Area Median Income for renters. This number is percentile ranked nationally into an index with values ranging from 0 to 100. Higher scores reflect better access to public transportation.
- Source: Department of Housing and Urban Development Accessed via API
- Assumptions: Converted the index (hh6_transit_trips_renters) given to percentile ranked nationally.
- Metric: Low transportation cost index
- Description: This index reflects local transportation costs as a share of renters’ incomes. It accounts for both transit and cars. This index is based on estimates of transportation costs for a three-person, single-parent family with income at 50 percent of the median income for renters for the county. Values are inverted and percentile ranked nationally, with values ranging from 0 to 100. The higher the value, the lower the cost of transportation in that neighborhood.
- Source: Department of Housing and Urban Development Accessed via API
- Notes: Inverted the original metric (hh6_t_renters) then converted to a percentile ranked nationally.
Environmental Quality
Safety
Exposure to crime
- Metric: Rates of reported violent crime
- Description: Violent crime is composed of four offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Rates are calculated as the number of reported crimes per 100,000 people. The FBI cautions using UCR data to rank or compare locales because this can create, ‘misleading perceptions which adversely affect geographic entities and their residents.’
- Source: Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) Uniform Crime Statistic (UCR) Crime in the United States, 2019, accessed via api.usa.gov; American Community Survey 5-year data, 2019
Overly punitive policing
- Metric: Rate of juvenile justice arrests
- Description: This metric includes both delinquency and status offenses. Delinquency referrals are made when youth violate criminal law. Status offenses are acts that are only illegal for youth under 18 (ex. Runaway, truancy, ungovernability, liquor law violation, tobacco violation). High rates of juvenile arrests provide strong indicator of system involvement and over policing.
- Source: Easy Access to State and County Juvenile Court Case Counts (EZACO) available from https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/ezaco/
- Notes: To calculate the rate of crime per 100k residents the ACS population data was used for each county. Juvenile arrests for each County. The 2019 data was used where available, but 2018 data was necessary for some states. The year of the data is noted by the states below. Not all states provide their data. States are noted if they did not have data in the last five years.
Opportunities to Learn and Earn
Education
Access to preschool
- Metric: Share of children enrolled in nursery school or preschool
- Description: This metric measures the share of a jurisdiction’s three to four year old children who are enrolled in nursery or preschool.
- Source: ACS 5-year data, 2019
Effective public education
- Metric: Average per grade change in English Language Arts achievement between third and eighth grades
- Description: This metric reports the average annual improvement in English (reading comprehension, written expression) observed between the third and eighth grades for each jurisdiction.
- Source: US Department of Education, 2018-2019 school year
- Notes: Scores in the original dataset that are ranges less than 10, the median value was used. Ranges larger than 10 were not used. If there are multiple averages, the final value was calculated using weighted average for differences within the same county.
Work
Employment
- Metric: Employment-to-population ratio for adults ages 25 to 54
- Description: This metric is the ratio of the number of employed adults ages 25 to 54 in a given jurisdiction to the total number of civilian adults in that age range living there.
- Source: ACS 5-year data, 2019
Population
- Source: ACS 5-year data, 2019