This webinar is part of the Power of Population Data Science Series
The Early Development Instrument (EDI) is a measure of children’s developmental health at school entry, collected for populations of children in Canada at regular intervals in many jurisdictions since the early 2000s. Today, the EDI data collected represent a unique, population-level database reflecting early child development in the country. To harness its potential for understanding broad-level processes that influence social determinants of children’s health and their impact on child development within the socioeconomic and cultural context of Canadian neighbourhoods, we created the Canadian Neighbourhoods and Early Child Development (CanNECD) database. The database includes the EDI data as well as neighbourhood socioeconomic characteristics, based on customized Taxfiler and Census data.
In this webinar, we will provide the background and properties of the EDI, and examples of recent research based on linking the EDI with other databases. We will also describe the process of constructing the database, its accompanying challenges, and highlight emerging results from a multi-jurisdictional as well as provincial perspective.
View original IJPDS article at: https://ijpds.org/article/view/431
Watch recorded presentation below.
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Speakers
Magdalena Janus, PhD is a Professor at the McMaster University’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences and the Offord Centre for Child Studies, in Hamilton, Canada. With the late Dr. Dan Offord, Magdalena co-developed the Early Development Instrument (EDI), a holistic measure of school entry-age children’s development in context in their early environments that was conceived with the forethought of population-based measurement. Since then, Magdalena and her team led the implementation of the EDI in Canada – which now surpassed 1 million children, garnered the support of governments across the country, and created a widely-used source of data on early child development. Magdalena's research interests include social determinants of children’s health, transition to school, with a particular emphasis on children with special needs, and communities' engagement in children's early development and health.
Dr. Martin Guhn is Assistant Professor at the Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP), School of Population and Public Health, UBC, and member of the Canadian Council on the Social Determinants of Health. He has a PhD in Human Development (UBC), conducted a Michael Smith Foundation of Health Research postdoctoral fellowship in Population Health at HELP, and has a masters degree in Psychology and a bachelor degree in Music.
His interdisciplinary, applied research focuses on social, cultural, demographic, and socio-economic determinants of children’s and adolescents’ developmental health, wellbeing, and educational trajectories, drawing from HELP’s EDI and MDI research projects. Further research interests include children’s social and emotional development, bio-ecological theories of human development, validation of population-level assessment, measurement of change over time, educational reform, and school- and community-based knowledge mobilization.
