Data Isn’t Information Until It Tells Us Something
by KATE Rohdenburg
If you haven’t had a chance to listen to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s podcast Resource on the Go, it’s worth a visit. Recent episodes exploring Intersectional Data invited guests from a multidisciplinary team from Minnesota to present their framework for collecting data from youth that both 1) accurately captured lived experiences of harm and 2) could be meaningfully used by practitioners to improve prevention work in the state. The three-part series is worth a listen, particularly for those most wonky on the applications of the word that’s all abuzz these days: “intersectionality.” One of the many things that stuck with me reminded me of a quote from Soraya Chemaly’s TedX: “Small changes in initial conditions yield exponential changes.” The team presented intersectionality as a series of choices, providing a guiding value for each and every step they took in their design and implementation of the framework. It’s not the end goal, it’s the practice, because of course: the means are the ends.
A data scientist once told me that data isn’t information until it tells us something. This podcast was a useful reminder that the information we collect from survivors must be done with purpose. So often, grant requirements can lead to evaluation or statistical analysis that are gathered because they’re the easiest to collect or fulfill a funding requirement – but they may not actually give us information useful to ending the ways harm, violence, and oppression occur in the lived realities of the young adult communities from which we are gathering data. This becomes an endless cycle of data collection without resonance. This collaborative and intersectional approach from Minnesota centers the following essential questions:
How are young people experiencing harm?
How will this information help us to prevent that harm among youth?
I kept marveling at the ways the team was focused on building autonomy and breadth for youth to describe their experiences, creating models that allowed for the data to be manipulated such that it could be specific – yet not limiting. The team asked and answered for themselves again and again: What do we want to know? What will we do with that information? What is our framework and does it reflect the experiences of the people responding? How will these questions be understood? Will participants be able to respond with information about their lives? How will we apply what we learn?
Ethical and intersectional data collection is not just about confidentiality, but an explicit intention to learn in order to meaningfully help.
It is helpful in times of information overwhelm to remember that we have the tools to do what we aspire to, but sometimes we lose sight because of the harmful grip that urgency, perfectionism, and paternalism have on the public health world. If the intended impact of our decisions center care for those who will be most impacted, attention to those who are hidden, and investment in those who are disenfranchised, we will collect data that is reflective of these values. Much like sexual violence prevention – it is not one large thing, but all of the very many small things that we do every day that shifts the narrative and changes the system.
At Soteria Solutions, we are committed to centering identity, power, and safety in all aspects of research, curriculum design, prevention programming, implementation, and evaluation. Detailed in the podcast episodes is the importance of breaking apart frameworks to express data in a way that humanizes the social connectedness of harm instead of stratifying it hierarchically – essentially creating a constellation of communities where it is impossible to focus on just one identity factor in lieu of another. Translating data into prevention strategies, trauma-aware curriculum, and evidence-based solutions that can shift the way we interact and connect with each other is central to Soteria Solutions work.
Interested in meaningfully integrating intersectionality into your professional practice? Contact us below or share your thoughts or questions at info@soteriasolutions.org.
written by:
Kate Rohdenburg, M.S., Listserv Moderator and lead trainer for both College and High School Bringing in the Bystander® Prevention Programs and a Practitioner Fellow for PIRC. Kate is also the Program Director at WISE, where she has worked since 2007. Her work focuses on engaging youth to end gender-based violence, and on building organizations that can sustain social change activism. Kate’s work with youth has been recognized as innovative and instrumental in shaping best practice. She was awarded the 2016 Practitioner of the Year by Prevention Innovations Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, and has been featured in reports for NPR, The Atlantic, and Brain, Child Magazine.