Want to quantify solutions? Build a data center
If you’re doing deep solutions reporting, dedicating time to gathering data is worth it
Solutions journalism is based on rigorous, evidence-based reporting that demonstrates the effectiveness of responses to difficult social problems.
Finding and quantifying that evidence, however, is one of the most challenging aspects of solutions reporting.
As a longtime believer in the power of data to produce high quality journalistic content, I was pleased to accept the invitation of the New York and Michigan Solutions Journalism Collaborative (NYMI SoJo), a coalition of news organizations and other partners that report with a solutions lens on caregiving for older adults, to create and oversee a data center for its nearly three dozen news and community partners.
Since embarking on this mission seven months ago, I’ve been able to assemble more than 225 text and data informational resources for the data center, along with contact information for 160 sources. These include, for example, a searchable website from the New York State Department of Health with information about quality of care for nursing homes around the state. Another good example is a directory from the Detroit Area Agency on Aging with contact information and descriptions of services offered by more than 30 agencies that assist older adults and their caregivers. More than 50 additional resources — mostly curated links — are part of a training bank meant to help reporters sharpen their skills.
The data center remains a work in progress, and I am adding more resources regularly with the support of the collaborative participants.
One of the key findings so far from collecting and reviewing resources about caregiving is that the United States is largely unprepared to deal with the volume of people who will need care as they age, and also lacks capacity to deliver many types of care that will be needed. We’ve also learned that when family members take on the task of caring for an older adult who is no longer fully independent (for any number of reasons, but most especially dementia) it changes the caregiver’s life dramatically. This, in turn, creates a need for various kinds of support and assistance.
Valuable insights such as these emerged especially from qualitative data such as academic studies and reports from government and non-profit agencies. Significantly, these same reports and studies frequently suggest innovative approaches to address particular problems. Innovations, of course, is another word for solutions that coverage can explore.
To complement the data work, I am developing a public-service oriented Resource Guide that curates a wide variety of publicly accessible information — from government agencies, non-profit organizations and the like — that caregivers would find helpful. The plan is to post this document on the collaborative’s website sometime in late spring or early summer and later turn it into a hard-copy resource.
Our main intent with the development of this tool is to meet the informational needs of the “hidden army” of informal caregivers. These are mostly family members who find themselves responsible for helping when older loved ones no longer can live independently and often do not know where to turn for assistance and relief. The reporting and research has already yielded evidence that having information about topics such as agencies and programs that can provide support goes a long way toward easing these caregivers’ burdens if they are aware of their options.
Both the Resource Guide and the still-to-come larger public Caregiving Coverage Data Center that we are designing draw on numerical and qualitative evidence about caregiving organized along the following lines:
- An academic resource bank, with summaries of scholarly studies about the topic. Many of these articles describe in detail — with supporting evidence — exactly how a particular innovation or intervention can improve life for caregivers and/or those for whom they are caring. Such an approach makes these studies ideal springboards for solutions stories, often with the evidence right there. This resource bank includes links to full-text or abstracts of the studies for reporters to review, and also contact information for authors of the studies so they can be reached as expert sources.
- A general resource bank, which is a repository of articles, reports, website links and other items that provide general background about caregiving. These are mostly resources from advocacy agencies, government bodies, specialty publications and other similar sources. Like the academic articles, many of these publications offer ideas about potential ways to improve the lives of caregivers, often supported with anecdotal or statistical evidence of ways they have been successful.
- A source bank with sortable, filterable spreadsheets listing individual sources (with relevant contact information), and also organization sources, such as state and local government offices and private sector advocacy groups. Keywords about the source’s area of expertise, affiliation (e.g. academic, government, non profit) and geography help reporters filter the list down to relevant potential sources.
- A data bank with statistics from government databases or academic studies, such as Census statistics for Western New York and Southeastern Michigan and directories of adult-care facilities, and links to various data portals.
- A training bank with resources that reporters and editors from the collaborative can use for self-instruction, including educational support materials about solutions journalism practices along with curated material such as video tutorials on data scraping and analysis.
The data center’s resources are currently reserved for use by the collaborative’s partners. Our team’s long-range goal, however, is to make them publicly accessible, and possibly monetized as part of the collaborative’s plan for long-range sustainability.
In this way, we think this data center could be a valuable resource not only for journalists but also for policy-makers, advocacy organizations, and those in the business of caregiving, such as home-health agencies and assisted-living facilities.
Increasing public awareness about all aspects of caregiving by producing groundbreaking reporting on the topic is our number one strategic goal for the NYMI SoJo Collaborative.
Our hope is that by bringing information from the data center into public view to complement our journalism we can catalyze a shift in the public conversation around caregiving from one about difficulties, such as news coverage of labor shortages of paid caregivers, to one that focuses on overcoming the challenges.
The NYMI SoJo Collaborative was formed about a year ago with the support of the Solutions Journalism Network and the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation with a mission to create solutions coverage on the increasingly important topic of care for older adults. It secured additional funding from the Health Foundation of Western & Central New York to hire staff, including the data coordinator who is building and managing the data center. The collaborative includes 26 news organizations and six community partners from the Buffalo and Rochester, New York and Detroit, Michigan areas. Its coverage can be seen at nymisojo.com.
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Jack Rosenberry is the data coordinator for the New York and Michigan Solutions Journalism Collaborative. He is a former journalism instructor at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York, and a former newspaper reporter and copy editor.
