Module 3: Data for Health Justice
Daniel Akinola-Odusola
Centric Lab
Featuring:
In this lesson, Daniel from the Centric Lab team will cover some of the fundamentals around how we define data and what that means in a health justice lens.
Key Learnings: Definitions
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Information used as a basis for reasoning, discussion, or calculation. The UN describes data as the “lifeblood of decision-making and the raw material for accountability.” Two primary uses are to create understanding and inform decisions.
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Data that can be expressed as numbers or measured.
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Data that cannot be expressed as numbers or measured.
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Data that you (or your team) are directly involved in creating and/or collecting.
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Data that is created and/or collected by an external source (e.g. university, government, consultancy).
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The agency, confidence, comfort, and education an individual or community has gathering, analyzing, and communicating with data to support their goals.
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[Coined by Ada Lovelace Institute] The increasing evidence that, as the accelerated adoption of data-driven technologies and systems during the pandemic, some people and groups have been ‘left behind’ with health and social inequities exacerbated.
Key Learnings: Our Thoughts
Data can be seen as a language to create understanding and inform decisions. Different types of data (such as quantitative vs qualitative, primary vs secondary) can contribute towards these two goals in different ways. No type of data is superior to the other.
Developing your data culture as a community is important for being able to understand and affect macro decisions that can impact your health and environment.
Lived experience data is a crucial and valid source of data that does not need hi-tech methods to create.
Data is a proxy for a phenomenon. The data about your health, for instance, is just a metric to create understanding and support decisions but cannot fully represent the experience.
An ideal data culture for health justice involves a mix of transparent and accessible sources of current knowledge, intuitive and achievable strategies for activities such as self-reporting, trusted sources to collect and store this information, and a greater involvement in using these processes to embed civic participation in decisions that affect the health and environments of communities.
What in this lesson stood out for you?
Debate Questions
These questions are framed to help you apply your own experience and perspectives to points raised in this lesson.
What has been your current level of comfort and confidence in using data as a language of understanding or informing decisions?
What instance(s) where data has been used to describe yourself or community has made you feel uncomfortable? If this has happened, what may have been the cause of discomfort?
Which spaces do you feel comfortable approaching your advocacy with data?
How To…
Develop a wider definition of data for health justice
Think of some key factors of your community health and/or environment then answer these questions to determine if there could be data, should be data, and what kind of data would represent these factors:
Quantitative:
Describe some countable metrics you consider useful to create an understanding of current community health and environment.
Qualitative:
Describe some information that isn’t countable but should be factored into the decisions impacting community health.
Secondary Data
Determine what data related to infrastructure or community health would be useful and who would likely collect or have access to this
Primary Data:
Determine if there are any notes or conversations amongst the community about their experience that could become useful for structural decisions.
Next Lesson:
Module 3 Lesson 2