Bullying At Home Just as Harmful as Within Social Settings

A new study just released in the Journal of Pediatrics confirms that bullying is a problem for childhood development whether it take place in social settings such as schools, or even within families. As the new research points out, just as with peer bullying, sibling bullying is also harmful to a child or teenager’s mental health.

“Historically, sibling aggression has been unrecognized, or often minimized or dismissed, and in some cases people believe it’s benign or even good for learning about conflict in other relationships,” says Corinna Jenkins Tucker, lead author of the paper and an associate professor of family studies at the University of New Hampshire. “That’s generally not the case in peer relationships. There appears to be different norms for what is accepted. What is acceptable between siblings is generally not acceptable between peers.”

Tucker’s report used data from The National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence, a phone survey that collected the experiences of 3,599 children aged 1 month to 17 years who had at least one sibling younger than 18 living in the household at the time of the interview.  The interviewers asked about incidences of sibling aggression in the past year, and they also assessed mental health by asking how often the children experienced anger, depression and anxiety. Where children were too young to answer questions, parents were asked to complete the survey/interview.

Bullying has been a topic of interest in the local Teen Assessment Project (TAP) surveys which can be found on the Human Services Planning page on the County webpage. While the Herkimer County 2013 TAP survey  will be released by the Fall of this year, the most recent survey results covering bullying are in the 2011 Oneida County TAP report. Below is the table provided which points out how bullying has declined among teens over the past decade or so.

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Updating Addresses: Why We May Not Get A Chance To Be Counted Fully In The 2020 Census

Besides recent efforts in Congress to drastically change the nature of the decennial census as well as the American Communities Survey (see this previous post), there maybe be another hitch-in-the-get-along when it comes to being fully counted in the 2020 Census. The Census Bureau is presently considering changes to its Local Update of Census Addresses (LUCA) program, which serves as the ONLY opportunity that local communities have to provide review and input into the Census Bureau's master address file.

LUCA involves local communities reviewing the master address file for inaccuracies - incorrect addresses as well as missing addresses from the file that serves as the basis for mailing out the census forms. In the past this opportunity has been made to every single community; however, the Census Bureau is now considering offering the chance to review and update these addresses to only "targeted" areas that have been traditionally hard to get responses from. This may mean that many communities would not be in a "targeted" area and hence would lose out on a chance to improve their counts while other communities will reap the potential benefits.

To give this some perspective, in the 2010 Census, our office reviewed some 105,000 addresses in the two county region; we submitted some 17,000 address changes or new addresses that were missing from the master address file; and in the end some 11,000 addresses were added to the Census Bureau's files for our area. That is more than 10% of our region addresses that were added in as a result of LUCA. Assuming an average household population of 2.39 people, that translates into as many as 25,000 people that may have been found that would have otherwise been missed if we weren't part of the LUCA program. Below are two maps showing the block level increases in addresses as a result of our LUCA effort.

Herkimer County LUCA

Oneida County LUCA

This potential change in how LUCA is conducted could have HUGE implications for our next Census counts in 2020.

Circular Area Profiles: Getting Data Within A Set Distance From An Address

The very talent people at the Missouri Census Data Center (MCDC) are presently offering a GREAT tool for assembling data for an area in concentric circles around a specific location. In other words, say you want to locate a business at a specific corner in the City of Utica. You can use this tool to give you demographic, economic, social and housing profiles within a given radius (say within 5 miles) of that corner. Previously Census 2000 tools have been able to provide  this, but this is the first one I have seen that works now with both the 2010 Census as well as the most recent five year American Communities Survey data from 2011.

The "circular area profiles," as the MCDC is calling them, requires a user to input the latitude and longitude of the location being targeted, along with a few other minor things like giving the circular area a name, etc., in order to generate the profiles. So say we wanted to know about an area within 5 miles of the SUNYIT Campus in Marcy. The website provides a Google map application which allows you to type in the address of the location you are interested in and gives you the coordinates for that point. The lat-long coordinates for SUNYIT are 43.135118 and -75.229109, for example. If you type these coordinates into the appropriate boxes and then select a ring of 5 miles, you can then generate all sorts of information about the local population. The tool also allows you to pick multiple distances from the same point, so you could ask for data at a 5 mile, 15 mile, and 25 mile circle, all at the same time. Here is just a tip-of-the-iceberg sample:

The program is a beta level test project at the moment so it may still have a few kinks. But the good people at the MCDC deserve a heap of credit and a bushel of thanks for their fine work on this project !

Internet Use and Connectivity in the US

In 2011, more Americans connected to the Internet than ever before, although differences continued to exist between those with use and those without. Just as with differences in use, variation in the ways that people were connecting online and the frequency of their use remained prevalent as well. A recent report of the Census Bureau, Computer and Internet Use in the United States, provides household and individual level analysis of computer and Internet use. The findings are based on data collected in a July 2011 supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS), which includes questions about computer ownership, Internet use both inside and outside the home, and the additional devices that people use to go online. The U.S. Census Bureau has asked questions in the CPS about computer use since 1984 and Internet use since 1997.This narrative report is complemented by a detailed table package that allows users to explore the data in more detail.

 

One of the more interesting pieces of the report deals with how connected people are with their devices. Access to computing technology and the Internet is not a simple “yes/no” proposition. As technology has changed and evolved over the years, people have seen an increase in the variation and number of ways they use computers and access the Internet. To explore this phenomenon further, a scale was developed for use in the report, designed to place individuals along a “connectivity continuum” of access variations, ranging from people with no Internet connection or computer, to those connecting from multiple locations and devices. The result is the following graphic – please be sure to note the percents in parens after each level of the continuum. These are the national sample percentages of people at this level of connectivity.

 

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In 2011, a plurality of Americans connected to the Internet from multiple locations and multiple devices (27.0 percent). These individuals were considered “high connectivity” individuals. The second most common position on the continuum was the opposite extreme—individuals without any computer or Internet activity at all (15.9 percent), or “no connectivity” individuals. The remaining 57 percent of Americans were located somewhere between these two extremes.

What surprised me in this report was the map below. It shows the percent of the population having high connectivity access. Basically states are broken into three classifications – those who have a significantly higher percentage of their population with high connectivity access than the national average (which was 27%) by the way); those who didn’t vary significantly from the national average; and those states that had a significantly lower percentage of their population having high connectivity access.

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As the report notes, “The majority of southern states lagged behind the nation in terms of highly connected individuals. The same can be said for segments of other regions, as pockets of the West, Midwest, and Northeast all contained multiple states with low percentages of high connectivity...” Unfortunately one of those states is New York ! Apparently we are working at a significant disadvantage when it comes to high  levels of connectivity to the internet.

How Important Are Small Businesses?

We often hear that small businesses are the engines of job creation in the United States. According to an article on Forbes.com their value and the role they play in our economy is sometimes underestimated because, they are in fact, small. But the truth is there’s nothing small about the impact they have on our economy. They cite a recent study by Entrepreneur Magazine that there are between 25 million and 27 million small businesses in the U.S. that account for 60 to 80 percent of all U.S. jobs. And, a recent study by Paychex, says that small businesses produce 13 times more patents that larger firms.

Those numbers may be a little high, at least compared to numbers derived from the Census Bureau.  The website Feefighters.com offers the following infographic that lays out the importance of small businesses (which typically means businesses with 500 or fewer employees) based on Census Bureau statistics.

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  Locally, small businesses make up nearly ALL of the establishments in our area based on the definition above of having 500 or fewer employees. Here's a breakdown for Herkimer and Oneida Counties of the number and proportion of business establishments based on their size (as measured by the number of paid employees that they have). These numbers come from the County Business Patterns for the latest year (2011).

2012 Population Estimates for Cities and Towns

Each year, the Census Bureau's Population Estimates Program utilizes current data on births, deaths, and migration to calculate population change since the most recent decennial census and produce a time series of estimates of population, demographic components of change, and housing units. The annual time series of estimates begins with the most recent decennial census data and extends to the vintage year. These estimates are used in federal funding allocations, as survey controls, as denominators for vital rates and per capita time series, and as indicators of recent demographic changes. With each new release of annual estimates, the entire time series of estimates is revised for all years back to the last census. All previously published estimates are superseded and archived.

Below are the data showing the most recent population estimates for each county and their respective towns and cities. The two maps give you a quick visual as to areas (shaded in green) that the Estimates Program show as having gained population since the 2010 Census.

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E-PLOSION !!! The Rise of E-book Circulation in Local Libraries

Between buying a Kindle, an iPad, or an Android Tablet, a lot of people are moving toward paperless book reading these days. Preliminary data from the annual BookStats study, released last month by the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group, shows that 457 million electronic versions of books, or e-books, were sold last year. That's up 4456% since 2008, when just 10 million e-books were sold. And while this is impressive growth, it's still fewer than the 557 million hardcovers sold last year.

But even with more than a 4000% growth in sales, the news isn't "perfect" for the e-book sellers out there. After three years of triple-digit increases, the number of e-books sold last year grew by only 43%. And that's enough of a difference in the annual growth rate to have publishers talking about an e-book "slowdown," even as digital books remain the fastest-growing part of the market. They now account for about 20% of all book sales reported by publishers.

The Herkimer County 2012 Risk Assessment Profile (which I mentioned in this previous blog post) has a ton of information in it, including some data about e-book access among patrons of the Mid-York Library sytem. Among the vast amounts of data it has concerning Herkimer County is the chart below. It shows the huge growth in e-book and audio-file circulation for the libraries in Herkimer County between 2008 and 2011. Usually, downloadable e-books and audiobooks figures are included in total circulation figures; however the data have been disaggregated to illustrate that usage in Herkimer County tripled nearly across the board over 3 years and patrons in Herkimer County are using innovative technologies provided by their libraries. Be sure to check out the Risk Assessment and see what other interesting data it brings to light!

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