Creating local civic indicators with big data

BARI experimental flyer to increase response rate

Very interesting lunchtime talk by Dan O’Brien (from Boston Area Research Initiative) and Chris Winship (at the Harvard Kennedy School and co-director of BARI).

As Chris points out, most data that academics use are high quality. Researchers spend a lot of time working on the sampling frame to ensure that respondents are randomly selected and take great pains to ensure that the responses are accurate.

Dan O’Brien and Chris Winship have done pioneering work using non-academic, noisy, but very large scale, free data (since the city of Boston already collects these data incidentally) to try to understand Boston neighborhood-level ecometrics and engagement, or even down to the level of Census block groups.

O’Brien and Winship’s effort fall somewhere between traditional academic research and even more frequent but noisier data like Twitter feeds or cellphone logs (from which one can also extract interesting data on friendships or other features of social capital — see this earlier blog post of mine and a recent paper by David Lazer on communication patterns in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing.]

O’Brien and Winship use the public hotline CRM (“Constituent Relationship Management) dataset that individuals in Boston use to report problems to the government: e.g., requesting a snow plow, or reporting a pothole needing fixing or graffiti or a broken streetlight.  There were 365,000 calls in 16 months from 2010 through 2011, and users could also report data using a smartphone app called CitizensConnect.

A cool video displaying a year’s worth of “calls” to the CRM hotline by type of call is here:

They first defined CRM categories that matched physical disorder of neighborhoods (selecting 34 of 178 possible CRM categories), like trash issues (improper or overflowing dumpster) or graffiti, or illegal occupancy of mice infestation… They then sorted these 34 categories by which items clustered together and found 5 factors (housing issues, uncivil use of space, big building complaints, graffiti or trash). They then validated these data by controlling for the engagement of neighborhood residents and their concern for the public space.

To determine engagement they measured things like the percentage of an area that were registered with CRM or the percentage who reported a common event (like requesting a snow plow during a heavy storm).

They could then calibrate an adjusted measure (the raw volume of “calls” on CRM adjusted for higher or lower levels of engagement) and compare this with actual audits by neighborhood of real problems (street garbage or street lighting outages).  From this comparison,  they have now constructed a model to predict the level of “broken windows” in an area.

They have discovered that CRM data is reliable and they can reliably estimate local civic physical disorder at the Census tract every 2 months from these data.

In the future, they want to use these CRM data and lots of other data that they’ve added like building permits, Census data, 311 calls, etc. to get a better sense of what factors predict which, how neighborhoods are changing, emerging problems or issues, etc.  For example, they can see houses or locations that are key places for private disputes (since these turn out to be a downstream trigger for crime, more so than broken windows).

Some interesting takeaways or tidbits from their talk:  the CRM model assumed that citizens would rove around the city reporting problems  via CRM. It turns out that almost no one did that other than Mayor Menino (who sometimes faked an Italian accent in reporting them, and reported over 1000 incidents in a given year!).  76% of users reported only one problem, and of those reporting multiple problems, most did not specialize in the type of issue reported but 87% of users reporting 2+ times were confined to two blocks.

Because of this hyper-local CRM reporting, they tried an experiment: leafletting homes in an area with two versions of the flyer (pictured above). They found  that flyers that asked people to report potholes to help improve Boston had no impact on increasing the response rate, but flyers that asked people to report potholes to improve ___  (filled in with their neighborhood name like Dudley Square or Eagle Hill, did).

Renters were only a quarter as likely to report issues as homeownwers (directionally similar to the general national data on civic engagement although I believe a far stronger effect.)   And their measure of engagement (what they called “custodianship”) has the advantage that it is actually tracking their behavior rather than measuring people’s recollections of civic behavior (which could be overstated if people think of themselves as good citizens or under-reported if people don’t remember the times they were involved) and which is a far better measure than people’s attitudes.  [They define custodianship as “Any action that seeks to counteract the physical deterioration or degradation of the public space, either by addressing extant issues, or preventing future ones.”]

[They have not yet done the work to see if their measure of “custodianship” tracks and is strongly related to other measures of civic engagement, like localized voting rates in local elections, or the percentage of residents who fill out Census forms.]

In CRM, People reporting problems get emails when the problems are fixed and apparently the response is very neutral and technocratic and not based at all on whether it was an area that supported Menino or was wealthier.  It is unclear whether that will be equally true under Mayor Walsh, given that his political support much more comes from the eastern part of Boston, except for East Boston.  [WBUR picture here.] They have not done studies on whether different messages cause people to have higher collective efficacy (a sense that they can make a change) or report city problems more in the future, but they are doing some studies on the former.

They have also introduced a smartphone app StreetCred (a bit like FourSquare) that enables people to check in when they attend a community meeting or report a community problem and build a higher score by doing certain civic actions., especially by reporting problems further than 1 block from their residence (to encourage people to take civic stewardship of their city more broadly).  They have not yet been able to measure its effectiveness.  [See “Designing Citizen Relationship Management Systems to Cultivate Good Civic Habits” by Jesse Baldwin-Philippi and Eric Gordon (Engagement Game Lab, Emerson College)  on ways to make programs like CRM spur greater civic engagement.]

They also enable one to explore this data through a map (or here with My Neighborhood) and download data.

Read a working paper “Ecometrics in the Age of Big Data” by O’Brien, Rob Sampson, and Winship validating that the CRM data could be used in this way.

[Also, there is a nice geographic visualization of money in politics in Boston showing organizational and individual influence on candidates over 2012 called “MoneyBombs” here.]

American Grace co-author David Campbell on religion and giving

Flickr/Much0

David Campbell (Co-Author of American Grace) has a piece in TIME.com on the link between religion and giving.

Excerpt:

Over the last twenty years, one of the most stunning changes to the American social landscape has been the dramatic rise in the percentage of Americans who report having no religious affiliation—the group that has come to be known as the “nones.” Today, 20 percent of Americans disclaim a religious affiliation,and among millennials, it is over 30 percent. At the same time, there has been a growing debate over whether the secularization of society will lead to a decrease in charitable giving, with secularists—whether they consider themselves atheists, agnostics, or humanists—tending to argue that fewer religious Americans will simply mean fewer contributions to pay for churches and synagogues that fewer Americans are attending anyway.

Not exactly. A new report by Jumpstart and the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy details the many ways that religion and the charitable sector are intertwined. Based on a major national survey, this report finds that three-quarters of all household charitable giving goes to organizations that have religious ties. These span the range from large organizations like the Salvation Army (which, many Americans do not realize, is actually a church) to small soup kitchens run out of church basements.

Read the rest of David Campbell’s “Religious People are More Charitable” (TIME.com, 11/26/13)

Deserving a place in an individualistic society

Flickr/wallyg

Kevin Carey, director of the education-policy program at the New America Foundation, writes in Chronicle of Higher Education the speech he wished the dean of admissions had given to the incoming class at Stanford:

Excerpts:

 I know this is an important day for all of you. You have spent years of your lives trying to get here. Driving into Stanford this morning must have seemed like living a long-imagined dream. And yet, I know many of you are nagged by something. …”Do I really deserve to be here?… Not yet.

[He said that they won’t deserve until they have served others, and they have largely thus far served themselves…]

“You had a lot of help, of course….Most of you came here from privileged places. It was hard to miss all of those late-model luxury cars lined up in front of the dorms this morning, disgorging your stuff. You’ve inherited financial and social capital that the average person can scarcely imagine….”

“Don’t mistake my talk of service for an appeal to your selfless nature. That need you feel to deserve what you haven’t earned? That is a craving that can’t be filled. That kind of desire will consume you in the end. You can choose otherwise.

So I say to you, on this brilliant day, in this lovely place, that while you do not deserve to be here, you could, someday. …[And] [w]hen you deserve it, come back to us. Share your service with your peers and your children. Then you’ll be part of our family. Then you’ll truly belong.

It’s a fitting tribute at a deeper level to the thanks that any of us who succeed owe to so many who have made that possible: our family’s efforts to nurture us materially, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually; the role of official or unofficial mentors or coaches along the way; the role of unofficial heroes to inspire us; the role of governmental policy in shaping and offering us opportunity or in enforcing rules that allowed us to succeed; the role of others in our neighborhoods and communities who trusted us or helped us or sustained us.

America is such an individualist-worshiping culture  that we are sometimes misled to believe that we each succeeded or didn’t on our own, when this is so extremely rarely true when one digs deeper in the life stories of humans.

Good places for kids’ social mobility

Scholars Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hedren, Patrick Kline and Emmanuel Saez (from Harvard and Berkeley) have garnered richly deserved  attention for their interesting retrospective look at which places were the best in America for low-income kids to be born in 1980 and 1981 to assure the highest rates of youth mobility.  [Amazingly, to do this, they were able to examine tax returns of all Americans and connect the youth with where they had grown up.]

[To explore the above map where blue areas are areas of highest mobility and red areas are areas of lowest mobility, visit the New York Times site.]

Their work rhymes with two pieces of research that we have done.

First, they find that the places that promoted the greatest level of mobility were  places high in social capital.  [For an image of social capital by state in the US c. 2000 see here.] This is less surprising, since other scholars have found that places with high social capital were among the places historically to invest in public high schools (e.g., Larry Katz and Claudia Goldin’s work on the birth of American public high school movement in the American heartland).  Moreover, recent research by our research team, highlighted in Robert Putnam’s “Crumbling American Dreams” shows the changes in levels of community solidarity and togetherness, exemplified by the changes in his home town of Port Clinton, OH.

Second, they find that places with greater percentages of minorities were also places that afforded less social mobility for young people.  This resonates with work of Ed Glaeser and Alberto Alesina on how it is harder to foster public investments in places of greater diversity (in the US and Europe) and work that we did in “E Pluribus Unum” that also discusses the short-term challenges of increased diversity.

While their work is retrospective, we are actively involved in gathering data on social mobility for youth from the bottom third of American households (in income and education) that strongly suggests that whether levels of mobility that existed for lower-third youth in the past, future rates of mobility are likely to much lower.  Stay tuned for our evidence of this coming crisis and what we might do about it.

Great NYT Op-Ed on stalling youth opportunity by Jen Silva (UPDATED 7/2013)

Flickr/nfscnnr

One of our post-doctoral researchers, Jen Silva, has a very interesting op-Ed in Sunday’s New York Times that comes out of her research talking to young people in Lowell, MA and Richmond, VA about the challenges for working-class youth today.

Snippet:

In a working-class neighborhood in Lowell, Mass., in early 2009, I sat across the table from Diana, then 24, in the kitchen of her mother’€™s house. Diana had planned to graduate from college, marry, buy a home in the suburbs and have kids, a dog and a cat by the time she was 30. But she had recently dropped out of a nearby private university after two years of study and with nearly $80,000 in student loans. Now she worked at Dunkin’€™ Donuts.

‘€œWith college,’€ she explained, ‘€œI would have had to wait five years to get a degree, and once I get that, who knows if I will be working and if I would find something I wanted to do. I don’€™t want to be a cop or anything. I don’€™t know what to do with it. My manager says some people are born to make coffee, and I guess I was born to make coffee.’€

Young working-class men and women like Diana are trying to figure out what it means to be an adult in a world of disappearing jobs, soaring education costs and shrinking social support networks. Today, only 20 percent of men and women between 18 and 29 are married. They live at home longer, spend more years in college, change jobs more frequently and start families later.

For more affluent young adults, this may look a lot like freedom. But for the hundred-some working-class 20- and 30-somethings I interviewed between 2008 and 2010 in Lowell and Richmond, Va., at gas stations, fast-food chains, community colleges and temp agencies, the view is very different.

Lowell and Richmond embody many of the structural forces, like deindustrialization and declining blue-collar jobs, that frame working-class young people’€™s attempts to come of age in America today. The economic hardships of these men and women, both white and black, have been well documented. But often overlooked are what the sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb in 1972 called their ‘€œhidden injuries’€ -€” the difficult-to-measure social costs borne by working-class youths as they struggle to forge stable and meaningful adult lives.

The stories of young people growing up today from different walks of life will figure prominent in our forthcoming book on the growing youth opportunity gap in the US.

For those anxious to get their fix now of these stories, read Jen Silva’s book, “Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty” (Oxford University Press, 2013).

See also Jen’s piece in Salon re decline of working-class marriages with interesting snippets from her interviews.

Nextdoor and NYC team up to enhance neighboring

Flickr/kiki99

I’ve written in the past about efforts to use 21st century technological tools to enhance neighbors’ connections with each other, the sort that are far less common today than in the 1960s or 1970s.

Nextdoor, a leader in this space, has partnered with NYC Mayor  Bloomberg to provide Nextdoor services in 1800 existing NYC neighborhoods.  It’s a win-win partnership.  The city gets a platform that enables them to pinpoint messages that need to get out to certain neighborhoods (such as upcoming events, programs, news, emergency bulletins), and NYC through NYCGov will let New Yorkers know how they can better connect with their neighbors through the Nextdoor platform.  (These Nextdoor networks are secure so users have to verify they actually live in a neighborhood to join and users get to control what of this information is public and what is shared privately between neighbors.)

Nextdoor makes it far easier to share information with neighbors (on mobile phones or computers), whether it is about a community issue, or finding a good painter or babysitter, or setting up a block party, or providing other advice or recommendations.  Nextdoor is also an example of what Bob Putnam and I call “alloy” social capital that combines virtual and face-to-face elements.  We believe that alloy connections are stronger than either the purely virtual social connections in an online gaming community (for instance) and also stronger than purely face-to-face connections.  The platform of Nextdoor also makes it more likely that one will meet new neighbors when one follows up on a e-post by inviting a neighbor to coffee, or start waving to or talking with a neighbor who one previously passed silently.  And for neighborly relations that already exist, Nextdoor can help strengthen them by increasing the frequency with which one connects with neighbors.

See earlier post about Nextdoor here.

The Nextdoor-NYC announcement, builds on similar announcements with 120 city governments over the last 12 months including cities like San Jose, Denver,  Dallas or San Diego.  New York City is an iconic city of 8.3 million people and this agreement offers the potential to unlock a lot of social capital so we’ll watch this with bated breath and hope that many other cities will follow NYC’s lead.

It will be interesting down the road to plot out the rise of Nextdoor usage by neighborhood with its impact on social capital measures (e.g., trust of neighbor or borrowing/lending from neighbors) and on putative downstream measures (such as lower crime rate, from the higher level of e-“eyes on the street” to transmute Jane Jacobs‘ pearl of wisdom into the digital age.

See earlier Social Capital blog post on Nextdoor.

See Wired story about this collaboaration of Nextdoor and NYC.

Very nice calls to service by Oprah & Jon Murad (HKS) at 2013 Harvard Commencement

Jon Murad, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Kennedy School, is going off to be a cop in New York City.  His Graduate Student address  is a wonderful call to serve.

Snippets: 

“I’m probably not the only municipal cop in the country with 2 Harvard degrees, but I’m surely in a tiny cohort, but that’s not a boast but a lament. If there is something special about this place [Harvard] and the lessons that we learned here, and I believe there is, then America, the world needs people like you in these roles.  Because John Adams was dead wrong, success doesn’t mean rising to the top, it means changing the world. And here’s the secret: everyone changes the world, everything ripples. It’s how we do it that counts.

So how do we do it? Do you choose a job that serves others, as many of you have already done? Do you sign up to be a Big Sister? Do you check out Citizen Schools? Do you volunteer for Hospice? Yes…These things are the tab for your coming here when others could not. These things matter. These things may be better than making tons of money, although as a civil servant I wouldn’t really know. ”

In addition, Oprah Winfrey, the main commencement speaker, was cogent on life’s meaning.

“You will find true success and happiness if you have only one goal. There really is only one, and that is this: to fulfill the highest, most truthful expression of yourself as a human being. You want to max out your humanity by using your energy to lift yourself up, your family, and the people around you.”

The key to doing that, she said, is to develop your “internal, moral, emotional GPS that can tell you which way to go.” Oprah talked about her work with the Angel Network to assist victims of Hurricanes and other adversity and implored the Harvard graduates, armed with the latest technology to be their own Angel Network.

 

 

 

How loneliness kills

Flickr/cc/ewixx

Judith Shulevitz, in the May 13, 2013 New Republic has an interesting read “The Lethality of Loneliness.”

Excerpt:

“Psychobiologists can now show that loneliness sends misleading hormonal signals, rejiggers the molecules on genes that govern behavior, and wrenches a slew of other systems out of whack. They have proved that long-lasting loneliness not only makes you sick; it can kill you. Emotional isolation is ranked as high a risk factor for mortality as smoking. A partial list of the physical diseases thought to be caused or exacerbated by loneliness would include Alzheimer’s, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and even cancer—tumors can metastasize faster in lonely people….

“To the degree that loneliness has been treated as a matter of public concern in the past, it has generally been seen as a social problem—the product of an excessively conformist culture or of a breakdown in social norms. Nowadays, though, loneliness is a public health crisis. The standard U.S. questionnaire, the UCLA Loneliness Scale, asks 20 questions that run variations on the theme of closeness—“How often do you feel close to people?” and so on. As many as 30 percent of Americans don’t feel close to people at a given time….

“What He [God] wanted is for us not to be alone. Or rather, natural selection favored people who needed people. Humans are vastly more social than most other mammals, even most primates, and to develop what neuroscientists call our social brain, we had to be good at cooperating. To raise our children, with their slow-maturing cerebral cortexes, we needed help from the tribe. To stoke the fires that cooked the meat that gave us the protein that sustained our calorically greedy gray matter, we had to organize night watches. But compared with our predators, we were small and weak. They came after us with swift strides. We ran in a comparative waddle.

“So what would happen if one of us wandered off from her little band, or got kicked out of it because she’d slacked off or been caught stealing? She’d find herself alone on the savanna, a fine treat for a bunch of lions. She’d be exposed to attacks from marauders. If her nervous system went into overdrive at perceiving her isolation, well, that would have just sent her scurrying home. [John] Cacioppo thinks we’re hardwired to find life unpleasant outside the safety of trusted friends and family, just as we’re pre-programmed to find certain foods disgusting. “Why do you think you are ten thousand times more sensitive to foods that are bitter than to foods that are sweet?” Cacioppo asked me. “Because bitter’s dangerous!”

The article, well worth a read, discusses issues like that only about half of loneliness is hereditary, what areas of the brain light up when we are socially snubbed (the same portion that registers physical pain, i.e., the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex), what has been learned about the impact of the absence of loving parents on loneliness from the isolating experience of Russian orphans; and how Nobelist James Heckman is finding that many low SES children bear loneliness scars from poor parenting growing up (that is akin to the impact found by Steve Suomi and Harry Harlow on isolated rhesus macaques).

See other posts about the negative health effects and contagion of  loneliness and social isolation here.

Youth vote down significantly in 2012 elections, erasing much of gains in 2004/2008

The 2012 Current Population Survey November supplement has now been released which enables one to examine voting patterns by different racial and ethnic groups and different age groups.

Youth turnout among those ages 18-24 dropped 7.3 percentage points from 2008 to 2012, to 41.2%. This contravenes a CIRCLE report that preliminary turnout in 2012 was closer to 50%. [These declines have undone a lot of the gains in youth turnout in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections.]

If one breaks it down by racial origin, among all racial groups, voting rates for 18-24 year olds were down from 2008 to 2012, declining by 7.4% for non-Hispanic whites, 4.6% for Hispanics and 6.7% for blacks.  This reverses patterns seen in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections where the biggest voting increases came from 18-24 year olds.  For example, from 2004 to 2008, Hispanic 18-24 year olds and black 18-24 year olds increased their voting rates by 5.8% and 8.3% respectively.

Fig. 4 from Census Report “The Diversifying Electorate…” (5/2013)

CIRCLE noted earlier that the National Exit Poll from November 2012 estimated that these young people represented 19% of the voters and that  President Obama captured 60% of their votes compared to 37% for Romney. CIRCLE pointed out that if young people had stayed home or if Romney had captured half of the youth vote in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and Virginia, he would have won  the presidency.  The youth vote was also decisive in Obama’s 2008 victory.

Among adults, non-white voter turnout increased in 2012: more of that story here.  Blacks voted in 2012 at higher rates than whites for the first time since 1996.  Bad news for Republicans is that, according to the CPS, the share of white votes declined in every one of the battleground states in 2012 (other than Iowa).  As Nate Silver has noted (on 538 Blog), the share of non-white votes in battleground states makes a difference in changing the election results, unless one assumes that Republicans are suddenly going to start doing a better job of appealing to non-white groups.

Census reports that the overall turnout (youth and adults) was down somewhat in 2012 as well: from 63.8% in 2008 to 61.8% in 2012.  Michael McDonald, using different measures that rely not on self-reports but on ballots cast by state finds a similar pattern: 61.6% of those eligible to vote voted in 2008 and that declined to 58.2% in 2012 (a decrease of 3.4 percentage points or a decline of 5.6%).

(Michael McDonald)

There was some speculation in November that Hurricane Sandy was to blame.  While turnout declined substantially in Eastern states devastated by Hurricane Sandy,  turnout also declined in most states nation-wide, making it dubious that one can lay the blame for lower turnout on Sandy.

For more on racial patterns in 2012 turnout and age-based patterns see the Census report on this topic.

State of economy for less-educated young people compounds growing Opportunity Gap

Pell City 2007 HS graduation; Flick/kwsanders

While parts of the economy have rebounded since the Great Recession of 2008, the effects have been much worse for the poor, and especially the less-educated young Americans, and those not fortunate enough to graduate from college.

Since 2008, the housing market has started to bounce back.

The stock market, for those fortunate enough to have net savings rather than a negative net worth has more than recovered its recessionary losses (pictured is the S&P500 index).

The economy has created 6.15 million jobs from March 2010 through April 2013 (based on provisional numbers for March/April 2013), enough to lower unemployment but only through many people giving up on finding jobs.  The  percentage of Americans employed in the population hasn’t budged over the last 3.5 years and remains fixed at between 58% and 59%. Larry Summers thinks that the numbers of long-term unemployed is the biggest problem facing this country and is at historically unprecedented in the period since the Great Recession of the 1920s and 1930s.

Put this together with the data that David Leonardt released (“The Idled Young Americans“) showing that the impact has disproportionately fallen on young folks.  Moreover, levels of employment among 16-24 year olds, even as recent as May 2013 remain stubbornly at 45%, at levels not seen in the US since the early 1960s.

Our own research on the fact that children born to less educated families are facing a growing opportunity gap.  American young adults from the bottom socioeconomic quarter are graduating from high school or dropping out with less of the hard academic skills or soft non-cognitive skills necessary for life success.  [We find significantly growing gaps between children from the top third or quarter of socioeconomic families and the bottom third or quarter on measures as diverse as involvement in extra-curriculars, involvement in sports, K-12 test scores, obesity, social trust, involvement with religion, social connectedness, volunteering, college attendance, and college completion.]

And the intersection of these two trends — consequences of the current lackluster economy being borne by the young adults and the growing opportunity gap — means that these gaps are borne disproportionately by less educated young adults.

For example, if one looks at employment to population ratios for 25-34 year olds in 2012, it was only 69.8% for those with a high-school degree (but no college), whereas it was 84.4% for those with 4-year college degrees or more.  Another way of putting this is that only 16% of college-educated 25-34 year olds were out of the labor market versus 30% of those with only a high school degree.

And if that were not enough, there is growing body of literature suggesting that experiences of unemployment or involuntarily being terminated from jobs create long-term scarring effects both on the lifetime earnings of these young people, but also their civic and social connectedness throughout their lives.  [See for example Davis/von Wachter or Gregg/Tominey or Brand/Burgard.]

[There is also unpublished data on this scarring effect in: Laurence, James, and Chaeyoon Lim. “The Long-Term and Deepening Scars of Job  Displacement on Civic Participation over the Life-course: A Cross-National Comparative  Study between the UK and the US.”]

We are brewing a recipe for long-term adverse consequences for these young Americans, especially the less educated ones, and our government ought to be POUND-wise, even if it is “PENNY-foolish” in the eyes of others and invest in jobs for these young 16-25 year olds to avoid the much longer long-term adverse effects.