Executive Summary
This project is a cartographic visualization of EDI (Early Development Instrument) subscale data from the Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP) at the University of British Columbia. The scales and their associated subscale are specific areas of childhood development that are used to determine the level of risk those children have of experiencing challenges throughout school and in the future without additional help. Subscales scores are standardized and used to determine the scale, which is measured in percent vulnerable. EDI subscale data has recently been released to the public, and it has not yet been formally mapped. The purpose of this project was to map HELP EDI subscale data from Vancouver Wave 6 in a way that is easy to understand and could be used as the standard for how to map all the subscales across the province for all the waves.
This project was done in partnership with two members of the HELP team, who provided me with the data. Using only the data for Vancouver Wave 6, I found the maximum, minimum, and standard deviation to classify the data. Because subscale data is standardized to a meaningful zero, I used the standard deviation of approximately 0.2 to create six classes of equal interval from -0.6 to 0.6. Using ArcMap, I made choropleth maps of the data for each subscale according to this classification method. My final product was an 8.5×11” page for each scale and its subscales, showing the subscale maps as small multiples accompanied by the scale map visualized in the same format as HELP has used previously. These pages are intended to accompany an EDI subscale report, which HELP has already produced for each school district, that will provide an explanation of the meaning of the subscales and charts of the data to see the change over time. Mapping this data provides an additional method of viewing, comparing, and interpreting the data across scales, locations, and time that is complementary to raw numbers and charts.