Two children living two kilometres apart can have two very different childhoods in Canada. The gaps between children within communities are often wider than the gaps between communities. Inequalities can touch every aspect of a child’s life: an interlocking set of obstacles and missed opportunities that can persist throughout life and pass from one generation to the next. The indicators in the Community Child and Youth Well-being Survey are based on children’s human rights and entitlements and the conditions that should be achieved for every child. UNICEF’s research and experience shows that closing equity gaps between children is critical not only in principle, but because it is necessary to achieve higher levels of well-being for all. 

The Community Child and Youth Well-being Survey can yield data to measure how evenly children’s opportunities, challenges and outcomes are distributed. Different approaches to measuring inequalities or inequities include:

Horizontal equality: the extent to which different groups of children have different outcomes. You might measure the (statistically significant) gaps between child population groups (e.g., based on your demographic profile questions or the survey question measuring perceived affluence) and between these groups and the average or median values of particular survey questions. Use caution when making such comparisons. Look for at least a 5 per cent difference between groups, as a general rule to avoid “over-interpreting” statistically small differences.

Vertical equality: how equally outcomes are spread across all children. Using the UNICEF measure of vertical equality, you might measure the gap between children at the bottom and children at the middle of the distribution of outcomes for an indicator. For indicators where data are suitable (e.g., on an ordinal scale), this is calculated as the difference between the 10th percentile and the 50th percentile (median), or the mean below the median as a percentage of the median. (See UNICEF Report Card 13 for this methodology at www.unicef.ca/irc13.) For these calculations, you will need to ensure the research/data partner can produce the entire data set for the survey questions of interest.

Intergenerational equality: how child outcomes compare to adult or general population outcomes for particular indicators. For instance, you might measure the ratio of young people’s life satisfaction to adult life satisfaction. Adult or general population data for this and other survey questions may be available from Statistics Canada or from a local survey for your community and can illuminate whether children disproportionately experience adverse conditions.

Deprivation levels: indicators measuring overall deprivation. Indicators including going hungry and having access to the Internet reveal the gap between young people who have some level of deprivation and those who do not. 

Refer to the Demographic profile and Respecting diversity toolkit sections to help inform your best options for measuring inequality meaningfully and acceptably. An important lens on these considerations is how representative the overall sample of survey respondents is, shaped by your youth engagement strategy and considering how closely the demographic profile of survey respondents reflects what you know about the youth population in your community. The results may not be a representative sample; therefore, they may over- or underestimate the challenges revealed by the survey. With a self-selecting approach, the latter is more likely to be the case. This does not mean the results of the survey aren’t meaningful or useful, but the analysis will need more reflection and care.

See Appendices for additional tips for data analysis and for a Sample Data Brief outline.