Methodology
College of Staten Island faculty and staff staged a series of meetings with members of the community to derive a general sense of the concerns and priorities of Staten Islanders. Through these dialogues, we leaned what Staten Islanders thought were the important issues worth measuring and monitoring.
Armed with this community mandate, a group of about twenty faculty and staff developed a list of indicators that captured the community's concerns and priorities. The indicators were then operationalized with various quantitative measures.
The indicators were logically grouped into policy domains. Small working groups of faculty and staff conferred with the Indicators project managers and consultants to identify data sources for the ten policy areas.
A group of graduate students collected and organized the data, under the supervision of the project managers.
The U.S. Census Bureau provided the bulk of the data collected here. New York City and State agencies also provided important information along with other Federal agencies. Infoshare, a project of the New York City non-profit organization Community Studies of New York, Inc was also a useful resource for data.
Other, non-governmental resources were used where the data they provide was not available from any government-funded source. These include the American Religion Data Archive, Fundrace.org, New York Real Estate Trends, and The Labor Research Association. Private data sources were carefully vetted for accuracy, consistency of data, and lack of bias.
Links to these valuable resources are available below:
- www.census.gov
- www.state.ny.gov
- www.nyc.gov
- www.infoshare.org
- www.thearda.com
- www.fundrace.org
- www.nyrealestatetrends.com
- www.laborresearch.org
Future plans for the Staten Island Indicators Website include: updating the site as new information becomes available from government agencies and other institutions; disaggregating data of interest to the zip code and neighborhood level; posting GIS (Geographic Information Systems) maps on the site; and posting data collected from surveys relating to Staten Island public opinion.
