The Data Divide: What We Want and What We Can Get

Craig Adelman and Erin Austin at Living Cities (Read Blog 1): “There is no shortage of data. At every level–federal, state, county, city and even within our own organizations–we are collecting and trying to make use of data. Data is a catch-all term that suggests universal access and easy use. The problem? In reality, data is often expensive, difficult to access, created for a single purpose, quickly changing and difficult to weave together. To aid and inform future data-dependent research initiatives, we’ve outlined the common barriers that community development faces when working with data and identified three ways to overcome them.

Common barriers include:

• Data often comes at a hefty price. …
• Data can come with restrictions and regulations. …
• Data is built for a specific purpose, meaning information isn’t always in the same place. …
• Data can actually be too big. ….
• Data gaps exist. …
• Data can be too old. ….

As you can tell, there can be many complications when it comes to working with data, but there is still great value to using and having it. We’ve found a few way to overcome these barriers when scoping a research project:

1) Prepare to have to move to “Plan B” when trying to get answers that aren’t readily available in the data. It is incredibly important to be able to react to unexpected data conditions and to use proxy datasets when necessary in order to efficiently answer the core research question.

2) Building a data budget for your work is also advisable, as you shouldn’t anticipate that public entities or private firms will give you free data (nor that community development partners will be able to share datasets used for previous studies).

3) Identifying partners—including local governments, brokers, and community development or CDFI partners—is crucial to collecting the information you’ll need….(More)