Ohio Colleges of MedicineGovernment Resource Center logo Ohio Children’s Opportunity Index (Version 2): Quick Start Guide

Author

Ohio Colleges of Medicine Government Resource Center (GRC) Opportunity Index Team

Published

December 11, 2023


Content Notes

This Ohio Children’s Opportunity Index (OCOI v2) data package includes one data file containing the overall OCOI (v2) score and each domain score for each eligible Census tract in Ohio. For details of how the index and domain scores are constructed, please see the Opportunity Index project’s FY22-23 report that is included in this data package.

Briefly, two important updates from v1 of the OCOI are the following:

  1. We now use the 2020 Census tract boundaries. Therefore, these data will not directly match up with data using tract IDs from 2019 or earlier
  2. We improved the data imputation methods. We now use geographically referenced data imputation for tracts with limited or no source data. Even tracts with no people or source data will have reasonable values for the overall OCOI score, which may be useful in cases where geocoding software inadvertently places an observed location in a non-populated tract.

The table near the bottom of this page gives basic descriptions of the fields in the COI data file. “Domain scores” are representative of the degree of opportunity for a tract with respect to the specifically named domain. The domain scores are standardized such that they all have a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one. The “Overall Children’s Opportunity Index” value is a calculated from the domain scores—the domain scores are transformed (described in the included report) and their unweighted mean, rescaled to range from zero to 100, is the overall COI that represents overall children’s opportunity for the area. All variables are directed such that higher values refer to higher levels of opportunity.

Variable Names and Brief Description

Variable Description
tract Census tract identifier
d_family_stability Scores for the family stability domain
d_infant_health Scores for the infant health domain
d_childrens_health Scores for the children's health domain
d_housing Scores for the housing domain
d_access Scores for the access domain
d_education Scores for the education domain
d_environment Scores for the environment domain
d_crime Scores for the crime domain
coi_v2 Overall Children's Opportunity Index (version 2)
no_pop An indicator that the Census tract had a population of zero

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Project Contact: nathan.doogan@osumc.edu