Indicators / Metrics of a Trauma-Informed Community

Hi, Mike:

We have a presentations tracker used by more than 60 geographic-based communities on ACEsConnection. It's been so popular that any ACEs initiative that launches a community on ACEsConnection has one added to their site on ACEsConnection. Here's some information about it: https://www.pacesconnection.com...resentations-tracker

Also, in the next few weeks we'll debut the Community Resilience Tracker, which tracks organizations' progress in becoming trauma-informed and correlates that on a map with the burden of ACEs in a particular geographic area of a community. We're also adding sector-specific outcome data across a community. This will be part of our offering for communities that want to participate in a cooperative of communities that we'll be saying more about soon.

Hi!  Our community has struggled with this question for months.  We certainly are measuring how many organizations receive a training on resilience skills, how many people have seen the movie Resilience, how many physicians screen for ACEs, and going forward are considering measuring how many organizations take an organizational assessment to learn about things they can do to be more trauma-informed.  The hard part is how do we measure what is DIFFERENT about our community as a result of our work?  

How do we measure that the population is more resilient?  This is where we struggle.  Would love for ACEs Connection to help on this huuuuuuge question.  We are stumped.

Below are some resources that I have found helpful. A lot of work being done in the UK and Canada with reference metrics in the community, and also within a context (e.g. school, or food security which we are currently exploring).

Measuring Resilience (with specific examples related to food security) https://assets.publishing.serv...ilience_May_2016.pdf

Approaches to measuring academic resilience, a systematic review: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.o...81ea8a1c45960071.pdf  and website that explains what academic resilience is: https://youngminds.org.uk/medi...demic-resilience.pdf 

Understanding core resilience elements and indicators: a comprehensive review of literature: http://lindaliebenberg.com/wp-...on-November-2017.pdf

Glasgow Center for Population Health. Resilience for public health: Supporting transformation in people and communities

British Medical Journal. Road to resilience: a systematic review and meta-analysis of resilience training programmes and intervention

Mental Health Commission of New South Wales. Building Community Resilience and Wellbeing Report

If it helps, we've developed a data display for our region with education goals followed by resilience goals:

http://www.soesd.k12.or.us/sos...hat-we-are-tracking/

Priti Irani posted:

Below are some resources that I have found helpful. A lot of work being done in the UK and Canada with reference metrics in the community, and also within a context (e.g. school, or food security which we are currently exploring).

 

Measuring Resilience (with specific examples related to food security) https://assets.publishing.serv...ilience_May_2016.pdf

Approaches to measuring academic resilience, a systematic review: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.o...81ea8a1c45960071.pdf  and website that explains what academic resilience is: https://youngminds.org.uk/medi...demic-resilience.pdf 

Understanding core resilience elements and indicators: a comprehensive review of literature: http://lindaliebenberg.com/wp-...on-November-2017.pdf

Glasgow Center for Population Health. Resilience for public health: Supporting transformation in people and communities

British Medical Journal. Road to resilience: a systematic review and meta-analysis of resilience training programmes and intervention

Mental Health Commission of New South Wales. Building Community Resilience and Wellbeing Report

I thought the [Canadian] Aboriginal Healing Foundation's sequential reports were quite noteworthy, after having read the report of the Canadian Solicitor General's Report on the Aboriginal Residential Schools. 

Thanks. I am not familiar with them. I will look them up.  There are a lot of materials on the site.

The FITT Center, a NCTSN Center in Baltimore, is replicating the Trauma Informed Resilient City Breakthrough Series Collaborative and finding that the process has some sustainability power.  Check out the Collaborative Change Framework and the metrics teams used at https://thefittcenter.org/

Feel free to contact Kay Connors kconnors@som.umaryland.edu

or Laurel Kiser lkiser@som.umaryland.edu to learn more about it.

My First 5 colleagues in Shasta County (and their community partners) developed a list of long-term indicators they are tracking:

Kindergarten Assessment/Self-Regulation

Third Grade Reading Levels

911 Calls for Intimate Partner Violence

Sexual Assault in Adults

Abuse and/or Neglect in Children

Harmful Substance Use by Adults

Drug-affected Babies at Delivery

Substance Use by Children

Psychiatric Hospitalization/ER visits for Adults and Children

Offenders Who Successfully Complete Probation

Chronic Disease: Heart Disease

These aren't a direct measure of increased resilience or community connection. 

We are also very interested in measuring a sense of connection. We do a survey of the families of all incoming kindergarten students each year. Last year, we added these questions to try to measure community connections and a sense of community support (all of them are a strongly disagree to strongly agree scale answer):

I feel connected to my community

I feel supported as a parent

If there is a crisis, I have others I can talk to

I have fulfilling relationships with family and friends

I know where to go for help if I had trouble making ends meet

I know where to turn if someone in my family needed mental health services

Hope those help.

Good luck.  My only thought is have a lot of people involved who have experienced a lot of trauma..... they know best what helps and what doesn’t.  

I have found the Prevention Institute's Adverse Community Experiences and Resilience (ACE/R) Framework to be most useful. Their website is here:  https://www.preventioninstitut...ssing-and-preventing

Specifically, check out the, "What? Why? How? Answers to Frequently Asked Questions about the Adverse Community Experiences and Resilience Framework" which includes community trauma symptoms worksheets and commmunity resilience measures worksheets.  

I am not well versed in the literature but from what I've read, the indicators measured at the “community” level (versus aggregated individual-level surveys or interviews) have historically been underrepresented in the research literature and are, therefore, difficult for practitioners and evaluators to find.  Often times people use proxy measures like voter turnout for indicators of social capital, etc. As a practitioner, I've done a lot of work with the CDC's Division of Violence Prevention and they are very interested in this topic.  Check out this 2018 article, "Indicators for Evaluating Community- and Societal-Level Risk and Protective Factors for Violence Prevention: Findings From a Review of the Literature" that addresses these challenges and has a link to a supplemental table with potential indicators.  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cd...68/cdc_53168_DS1.pdf 

Other  sources for Neighborhood Safety, Cohesion and Connectedness

• The National Survey of Children’s Health has a module on Neighborhood and Community Characteristics with sub domains on social capital, neighborhood conditions, amenities, trust. These data are available at the census tract level under contract with Johns Hopkins, at the state level without. However, some health departments may have access to this raw data.
• The General Social Survey from NORC has reliable and long running (1972-2016) national data with a social capital module, as well as a community cohesion module. GSS geographic identification code files are made available to researchers under special contract with NORC. 
• The National Health Interview Survey in 2013 and 2014 included 4 questions on neighborhood social cohesion, 1) People in this neighborhood help each other out; 2) There are people I can count on in this neighborhood; 3) People in this neighborhood can be trusted; and 4) This is a close-knit neighborhood. Participant responses were then reverse coded (eg, definitely agree was assigned a value of 4 instead of 1); thus a higher score equated higher neighborhood social cohesion. A neighborhood social cohesion score was constructed by summing the responses to the questions, with a possible range of scores from 4 to 16.
• The Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development at Penn State data on the estimated stock of social capital in each US county for the years 1990, 1997, 2005, 2009, and 2014. No contract necessary.https://aese.psu.edu/nercrd/co...al-capital-resources