# Ohio Children’s Opportunity Index Version 3: Quick Start Guide

Author

GRC Opportunity Index Team

Published

October 17, 2024

## Introduction

The Ohio Opportunity Index (OOI) is a composite, area-based measure of neighborhood socioeconomic, structural, and environmental conditions representing opportunity to live healthy lives (i.e., social determinants of health). Its uses could include

- focusing resource distribution
- facilitating research
- informing policy decisions

by offering a comprehensive geographic view of the social determinants of health in Ohio at a Census tract, zip code, or county level.

## Content Notes

This data package contains the OOI version 3 data for multiple geographies (tract, zip/ZCTA, county), a brief report of methods and changes from OOI version 2, and this quick start guide.

The table near the bottom of this page gives simple descriptions of the fields in the OI data files. The domain scores are representative of the degree of opportunity in an area with respect to the specifically named domain. The “Overall Opportunity Index” value is an overall representation of opportunity for the area.

The domain scores and the overall OI scores are on different scales. The domain scores are means of the standardized individual variables nested within each domain and are themselves standardized to have a mean of 0 and standard deviation of 1. The overall OI score is a combination of the domain scores and has values that range between 0 and 100. All variables are directed such that higher values refer to higher levels of opportunity. Please see the included report to read more details of how the index and its components are constructed.

The zip code data file is intended to represent opportunity by zip code as opposed to (but not excluding) zip code tabulation area (ZCTA) identifier. We first assigned an OI score to each ZCTA. We achieved this by assigning a score to each Census block based on the Census tract in which it is situated and then aggregating those scores to the geographic ZCTA level using a weighted mean, in which the weight was the population size in the block. We then used a zip code-to-ZCTA crosswalk downloaded from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to effectively duplicate some ZCTA OI and domain values for all zip codes that the crosswalk assigns to each ZCTA. Therefore, joining/merging the OI zip code data file to your data will work well regardless of whether your data are identified by zip code OR by ZCTA.

## Variable Names and Brief Description

Variable | Description
--- | ---
tract, zip_code, county | FIPS or zip code identifier
oi | Overall Opportunity Index version 3
d_crime | Domain scores for crime domain
d_educ | Domain scores for education domain
d_employ | Domain scores for employment domain
d_env | Domain scores for environment domain
d_health | Domain scores for health domain
d_house | Domain scores for housing domain
d_trans | Domain scores for transportation domain
no_pop | An indicator (tract geography only) that the Census tract had a population of zero

Project Contact: Nathan.Doogan@osumc.edu