Data Visualisation
The Young Lives dataset contains a wealth of information about children’s lives – the economic circumstances and social environment of their families and their communities, their nutrition and health, access to schooling and education outcomes, how they work and play, as well as their perceptions of poverty and aspirations for the future. But it is hard to make the richness of the data easily accessible for others. Or even to present our findings in simple ways which are easily understandable to non-specialists.
We have recently embarked on a ‘data visualisation’ project, with the aim of exploring a range of different tools and techniques to make our data accessible to wider audiences. As a first step, we have developed a set of child profiles which tell the stories of 4 or 5 children from each of our study countries, using their own words and information taken directly from our qualitative research. These are accompanied by a specially commissioned set of photographs of children living in similar communities to give an immediate insight into the reality of the children’s daily lives.
Currently the data from our household and child surveys is contained in Access databases which can be accessed and analysed using statistical packages and econometric techniques. The datasets are publicly archived with the Economic and Social Data Service, through the UK Public Data Archive and are also available through the ESDS on CD-rom for researchers and policymakers from developing countries.
During 2009 and 2010 we will be developing a range of different programmes and techniques to present our data in different ways. The first of these is the Young Lives Virtual Village.
Visit our virtual village
The Young Lives virtual village takes some basic facts and figures from our survey of the children and their households in 2006/7 to present a ‘typical’ community in each of our study countries.
A visitor to the village can move around the community and visit the school, the hospital, the market, a typical home, etc. and view these from the perspective of child well-being. The data are an average across rural and urban communities in each country, so they are not intended to be comprehensive, but to give an insight into the many different elements that link together to affect child well-being.
Presenting changes over time
The virtual village is a simple representation of data from our second survey round, which we will develop over time, adding further information after our next visit the to children. And once we have the third round of data (following our survey in late 2009), we will be able to build other visualisation tools which start to show changes in children’s lives over time.