Search results

This survey was conducted as part of the New Jersey Childhood Obesity Study, a project designed to provide vital information for planning, implementing, and evaluating interventions aimed at preventing childhood obesity in five New Jersey municipalities: Camden, Newark, New Brunswick, Trenton, and Vineland. Conducted among households with 3-18 year old children in the 5 cities, the survey interviewed the adult who made most of the decisions about food shopping in each household. The survey examined perceptions about food and physical activity environments in the five cities, investigated barriers related to access to healthy food and physical activity facilities, and collected information on the height and weight and food and physical activity behaviors of the cities' 3-18 year old children and the adult respondents. In addition, the survey collected demographic information about the household members.

Four linkable datasets contain the survey data: the Household File, Index Child File, Adult File, and All Child File. The Household File covers household and neighborhood characteristics, while the Index Child File describes the characteristics and behaviors of a randomly selected 3-18 year old child in the household, who is designated the "index child" and is the primary unit of analysis. The Adult File comprises characteristics and behaviors of the adult respondent, and, lastly, the All Child File covers a few characteristics of all children aged 3-18 in the household.

The Children's Futures initiative was designed to enhance the health and well-being of children from birth to age three in Trenton, New Jersey through three major strategies: (1) Improving access to prenatal care and strengthening effective parenting; (2) Improving the quality of child care; and (3) Strengthening and sustaining positive involvement of fathers in their children's lives. As part of the initiative, data were simultaneously collected to assess the effectiveness of the initiative.

The data collection efforts included a baseline survey of the Trenton community conducted in 2002 and surveys of Trenton child care providers conducted in 2003, 2004, and 2005. In addition, births records for Trenton, Camden, and Newark were obtained from the New Jersey State Department of Health. These survey and birth records data were released as ICPSR 21640: Evaluation of Children's Futures: Improving Health and Development Outcomes for Children in Trenton, New Jersey, 2001-2005. The data from the 2002 community survey represents a baseline picture of the primary caregivers of children ages 0-5 in Trenton on a set of outcomes, among them parenting behaviors and strategies that the initiative hoped to influence.

This data collection contains the data from two follow-up community surveys. Like the baseline community survey, the follow-up surveys interviewed the primary caregivers of children aged 0-5 in Trenton households about child and parental health, parenting practices, fathers' involvement in their children's lives, health insurance and health care utilization, attendance at parenting groups or classes, and utilization of child care. In addition, the surveys collected information on country of birth, year of immigration, race, Hispanic origin, education, employment status, alcohol use, earnings, and household income.

The community surveys followed a repeated cross-sectional design. That is, individual community residents were not followed over time; rather, at each wave of data collection, a new sample of respondents were interviewed.

These data were collected for the initial phase of the evaluation of the Children's Futures initiative, a comprehensive set of interventions aimed at improving child health and development outcomes from prenatal to age three in Trenton, New Jersey. To that end, the initiative worked to (1) improve access to prenatal care and strengthen effective parenting, (2) improve the quality of child care, and (3) strengthen and sustain positive involvement of fathers in their children's lives. As part of the evaluation, a baseline community survey and surveys of childcare providers were conducted and births records were obtained from the New Jersey State Department of Health.

Extracted from New Jersey vital events public-use data files, Datasets 1-3 contain information on births during 2001-2004 to women in Trenton and, for comparison, two New Jersey cities not covered by the intervention, Camden and Newark. The birth records data include sex, birth order, birth weight, gestational age, one-minute and five-minute APGAR scores, month of pregnancy when prenatal care began, number of prenatal visits, weight gained during pregnancy, medical risk factors for the pregnancy, obstetric procedures performed, delivery complications, congenital anomalies and abnormalities, mother's marital status and number of live births now living, and the parents' age, race, Hispanic origin, state/country of birth, and education.

Dataset 4 contains data from the baseline community survey, which in 2002 interviewed the primary caregivers of children aged 0-5 in Trenton households. The survey collected information about child and parental health, parenting practices, fathers' involvement in their children's lives, health insurance and health care utilization, attendance at parenting groups or classes, and utilization of child care. Additional information collected by the baseline survey includes United States nativity, year of immigration, race, Hispanic origin, education, employment status, alcohol use, illicit drug use, earnings, and household income.

Datasets 5-7 contain data from the childcare provider surveys conducted in 2003, 2004, and 2005, which collected information about the teachers and childcare providers in the Trenton childcare centers that were participating in Children's Futures. Respondents were questioned about their work experience, age, race, place of residence (ZIP code), education, credentials, position held and hours worked, languages spoken, salary/hourly rate for the job at the center, childcare training and practices, opinions about center staffing levels, and beliefs about how to help infants and toddlers learn and grow. In addition, the respondents were asked how prepared they were to work with infants or toddlers with certain conditions such as emotional disturbances, attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADD/ADHD), fetal alcohol syndrome, asthma, severe allergies, and developmental delays.