Provide names of other journalists involved.
Trine Tsouderos, Joseph Germuska and Deborah L. Shelton
List date(s) this work was published or aired.
6/19/2011
Provide a brief synopsis of the story or stories, including any significant findings.
Analyzing state vaccination data collected from 5,500 Illinois public and private schools, Tsouderos, Germuska and Shelton identified clusters of unvaccinated or partially-vaccinated schoolchildren across the state. The team took the data a step further, building a searchable database of vaccination rates for each school in the state along with a searchable map identifying pockets of children who had not been fully vaccinated. We found that the number of schools with lower rates had increased in recent years, especially among schools serving large numbers of low-income children and private schools serving the affluent. The database and other online information is available here: chicagotribune.com/immunization
Explain types of documents, data or Internet resources used. Were FOI or public records act requests required? How did this affect the work?
We worked closely with the Illinois State Department of Education and its statisticians as we cleaned and analyzed the data and built our database on the 5,500 schools across the state. This was no small task as it involved developing a deep understanding of how the data were collected, its strengths and weaknesses. We spent a lot of time cleaning the data, ensuring they could be used in the way we hoped to use them.
Explain types of human sources used.
We enlisted statisticians at the Illinois State Department of Education, public health officials at the Illinois Department of Public Health and researchers at Emory University and the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention. We also spoke to school administrators, parents and the mother of a girl who caught whooping cough as a baby and is disabled because of brain damage she sustained as a result.
Results:
We received numerous laudatory emails from parents and physicians, thanking us for the public service our story and database provided.
Follow-up (if any). Have you run a correction or clarification on the report or has anyone come forward to challenge its accuracy? If so, please explain.
We plan to update our database with this year’s vaccination data as soon as we obtain it. We plan to do that every year, and over time, we can track trends.
Advice to other journalists planning a similar story or project.
One pitfall when working with data is not understanding the weaknesses or limitations of it. We worked closely with the statisticians who collected and analyzed the data to ensure we understood what we would say and what we could not, and we included a lengthy section in our database explaining that. So it is key to nurture a good relationship with the agency collecting the data and to also contact other researchers in the field and have them help examine the data as well.