The Arizona Community Data Project (CDP) website was developed by Bach Harrison, LLC and is brought to you by the Arizona Criminal Justice Commission (ACJC). Funds for the website are provided by the Arizona Governor’s Office for Children Youth and Families, specifically for the purpose of providing the recipients (i.e., community coalitions) of the Strategic Prevention Framework Incentive Grant (SPF-SIG) with localized data to inform their efforts at reducing youth substance use.

In a more generalized effort to enhance the decision-making of local policymakers and practitioners, a primary goal of the website is to create a central repository of information to house substance-related data in Arizona. The Community Data Project provides insight into the specific drug and alcohol challenges facing Arizona’s communities, including substance prevalence, at-risk populations, and the severity of substance-related outcomes like crime and traffic fatalities. Collectively, this information can help guide resource dollars for prevention and intervention efforts, and in doing so, maximize the return on investment for the state’s efforts at addressing substance abuse issues in Arizona.

Using the annual Arizona Statewide Substance Abuse Epidemiology Profile as a guide, the indicators available in the Community Data Project represent a comprehensive compilation of data related to the consumption, consequences, and context of substance use and abuse in Arizona. The online database tool is intended to complement the written state epidemiology profile report and expand on its use by including various demographic and geographic levels unavailable in the written form. Because one of the primary goals for the Arizona CDP has been to provide data that informs prevention planning at the community level, an extensive effort has been made to obtain as much data as possible that can be disaggregated at sub-state levels (primarily county and coalition levels). For community-level prevention professionals, the website offers several advantages over the written epidemiological profile reports, because it allows users to generate customizable queries of indicators by coalition or county, and output options of several years of data. Additionally, users can examine trends within certain demographic variables such as gender, grade, race and ethnicity when these data are available. As mentioned previously, having the most localized set of information allows users to allocate resources towards the most pressing problem and the most appropriate target population relative to their specific geographic location.

The data housed within the Arizona CDP dataset were collected from a variety of sources within the state of Arizona. The data are presented (and available for download) through the website as they were provided to ACJC by the source agency. For a complete list and descriptions of data sources contributing to the Arizona CDP dataset, please see the data sources tab of this website.

While the Arizona State Epidemiology Profile reports provide excellent overviews of the data at the state level, including comparisons between state and national trends, the online data system is focused on providing community (sub-state) level data that will allow prevention professionals at the community level to examine data relevant to the communities they serve. By default, chart and map presentations of the data from the online system focus on coalition, city, county, region, and state data (rather than national data), and allow comparisons between these levels of geography.

Every effort was made to include the most recent data possible for each indicator. However, most data sets do not have data for the current or previous year. There are a variety of reasons for the lag in data availability, including the fact that most data sources have one to three year delays in making their data available to the public. Moving forward, the existing website data will be updated as it becomes available.

Additionally, for many indicators the source agencies would not allow small numbers of events or cases associated with a particular level of geography (i.e., less than 25 cases per geographic or demographic level) to be released for public use. In some cases, source agencies would not allow any data lower than the county level to be released for public use. These restrictions regarding data release are intended to protect the anonymity of those who are counted as part of the statistics for those indicators. As a result, queries of some indicators may result in some coalitions, counties or regions having missing values that actually reflects that a low number of events occurred in that geography (i.e., less than 25 cases) for the specified time period. Typically, this occurs for indicators which are low frequency events (e.g., suicide, homicide, etc.), and/or in areas where populations are small (i.e., resulting in lower numbers of events).

Currently, the Arizona CDP online data system presents pre-calculated rates (or percentage use estimates) for most indicators. By providing rates rather than raw counts of the number of events associated with each indicator, it is easier to compare counties and regions to one another. Raw counts of the number of events associated with these rates are available to the user for some variables (e.g., arrest numbers), but should never be used for comparison purposes.

All rates presented through the Arizona CDP online data system (with the exception of the Arizona Youth Survey – AYS) were calculated using population projections (estimates) developed by the United States Census Bureau. For more detailed information please see the data sources tab on this site. Please note that the Census Bureau population estimates are updated each year, and as a result, the projections found in this website may differ slightly from the projections found on the Census Bureau website.

The AYS data for the Flagstaff Indian Center, Tucson Indian Center, and Phoenix Indian center are for Native American Youth only, as it was identified by your grantor and evaluation team that your coalition only serves this particular population. No localized AYS data were available for the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation coalition as there were less than 25 students who participated in the survey for the area this coalition serves. Based on the incoming 2010 AYS data, localized data will be available for this coalition, but demographic information will remain limited as the sample size is still too low for reporting any specifics related to grade, gender, race, or ethnicity.