Polling the Public on Children’s Health
The C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health is an ongoing research project that measures what the public is concerned about regarding the health — current and future — of the nation’s children. Matthew M. Davis, M.D., associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Communicable Diseases and director of the poll, explains how it works and some of what we’ve learned so far.
Q: Why a national poll on children’s health?
A: The goal is to measure and spread the word about public perceptions, opinions and priorities about children’s health and health policy. That’s been missing from a lot of the national dialog for years, in part because we haven’t asked the general public about their opinions. We wanted to step in and fill that gap.
We know by watching media coverage of our reports that we’ve reached audiences at the regional, state, national and even international levels. The poll has been picked up in European Union countries, in Central and South America, and in Asia. It’s been a farther reach than we expected; on the other hand, we recognize the universality of the topics we cover — for example, childhood obesity — and that the chief concerns that adults in the U.S. have about children can resonate with adults in other countries as well. So we have a strong sense that we are touching on important subjects, and we know from our polling that these are subjects that adults and parents in particular have a lot of strong opinions about.
Q: How does the poll work?
A: About every four months, we send a questionnaire to approximately 3,000 households across the U.S., and about 2,000 respond. We partner with a survey firm which works with roughly 45,000 households representative of the nation’s population. The survey firm provides Internet access for households without it, and that’s important because we know about 20 percent of children nationally live in poverty; poorer households are much less likely to have Internet access. From the characteristics of our respondents we know that there are many households living in poverty that are part of the group that answers our questions. The questionnaire takes about 10 minutes to answer; we analyze responses to each group of questions and produce several online reports from each survey. In two years we’ve released 25 reports online, free to the public, written in language that’s easy to understand. My hope is that the poll will continue indefinitely. As with anything like this, we need to secure funding in an ongoing way. We’ve been fortunate to have funding from within the U-M, and we’re looking for funding outside the University as well.
Q: What does the poll tell us overall about the public’s concerns regarding children’s health?
A: It’s enormously important to invest in children’s health because a lot of the national attention is directed at adult health — people who are sick already. We know from the poll that adults are worried about childhood health problems that can have long-term consequences — obesity, for example. The fact that the public realizes this and puts those problems at the top of the list speaks volumes about the degree to which they are concerned.
Q: What are the top issues identified by the poll? Were there surprises? New trends?
A: The top three concerns of adults about children’s health in 2008 were obesity, tobacco smoking, and drug use. Each, while they can have short-term consequences, can have lifelong consequences as well. The ordering changed slightly from 2007 when tobacco use topped the list. We have a great U-M resource, namely the Monitoring the Future Study in the Institute for Social Research’s Survey Research Center, which for the past 25 years has shown that tobacco use among kids has decreased to about half the level it was in the 1990s, such that a rising problem like childhood obesity has now captured the attention of the public. In terms of new trends, the most concerning is that of Internet safety. We were surprised that the first time it made the list — in 2008 — it landed right in the middle of the top 10. That’s led us to focus more on Internet safety in subsequent polls, although it’s difficult to measure what the public is most concerned about when it comes to the Internet. There are so many ways the Internet can affect children — issues of predators, inappropriate information, essentially seeing things too early for a child’s developmental stage. So what we’re trying to do is understand the different components of Internet safety that parents and other adults are most worried about.
Q: How do we bring what we learn from the poll to bear on policy and research?
A: Our agenda is to bring better information about the public to the public. We present our findings and let the advocates or legislators or interest groups use the information as they wish. We believe that’s important to maintaining objectivity, which allows us to present findings and have them be heard on all sides of the debate. If we were to advocate for one position or another, we’d likely lose the ear of the audience on the other side.
There are no other polls that we’re aware of that focus on children’s health and health policy in an ongoing way. There have been other polls conducted once in the past, but not the way we’re doing it, polling the public every few months on different topics. There are other polls conducted in an ongoing way by other research groups, but they’re about health and health policy at the national level in a large sense, which means they tend to be dominated by questions about adults’ health. We liked the way in which these other polling efforts worked and how they presented their findings, and what we try to do is to bring the story of children’s health and health policy into that larger pool of information.
Interview by Rick Krupinski
Podcast: Listen to Davis discuss the impact of the economy on children’s health