The 2013 Herkimer County TAP Survey Results Now Available !

The 2013 version of the Herkimer County Teen Assessment Project (TAP) survey report is now available ! This represents the fifth time the survey has been conducted in Herkimer County, the first time being in 1997. The survey is done on a four year cycle, so data now exists for teens in the county for the years 1997, 2001, 2005, 2009 and 2013. In total, more than ten thousand surveys have been collected over the sixteen years, representing about 80% of the target population each time the survey was administered.

The 2013 survey is generally broken into ten topical areas including: tobacco; alcohol; marijuana and other drugs; sexuality; mental health; perceptions of school and future; parent/child relationships; perceptions of self, peers and community; personal safety; and the internet and technology. The appendices includes a comparative table with data for all of the past surveys as well as the present survey. In addition, the present survey is broken out by gender and grade.

Portions of the survey will be discussed in future blog posts including material not in the current report. For now, you might want to download a copy of the 2013 report or go to the Planning Department website to view any of the previous reports. If you have questions about the materials you can contact me via email  or email Chip Bassett in our office.

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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