Mike Newton-Ward on "Local Data"

I would really encourage people to use the local data that they have. I think sometimes there’s a tendency to think, “Well, we should rely on national data because our local data is not good enough.” But generally people do collect a lot of local data at their local health department level, and some of the advantages of using that is -- particularly if you’re presenting the data back to stakeholders or to planners, budgetary people, county commissioners, what have you -- it makes a lot better case to be able to say, “This came from our county or our region,” rather than, “This was something that was done in another state.” So it really carries a lot more weight if you do use that local data with the decision-makers, and I think that’s an important thing to consider.

I think considering the size of the sample that you have available at the local level -- or even at the state level -- it’s something important to think about. It can still give you some good information. You have to be careful though not to generalize broadly from that information because the N can be very small that we have available at the local level. Still I think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages of it, because you can make the case that this is from our county. We’re talking about our people who are affected. And I think that really outweighs any disadvantage there is about the smaller number; but you should keep that in the back of your mind, that we cannot generalize too far or that the data might be time-limited, for example. Those are some of the negatives, but again I think the positives much outweigh the negatives.

One of the nice things about doing focus groups or structured interviews locally is, again, that you are able to get that local flavor. I think a lot of times we find out that the determinants of a particular health behavior or health problem do vary somewhat for the same behavior but by region-to-region or state-to-state or even county-to-county, and it’s important to be able to say, “Well, this is what’s happening with our target population of interest.” And it really strengthens your case to be able to say that this is very localized to us.