The literature on child well-being and the measurement of such is large and growing. Policy organizations like the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, and Child Trends, to name just a few, are focused on the issue of children, their life situations, and the threats and circumstances surrounding children in their everyday lives. These organizations routinely produce volumes of information that describe and explain how children are faring. Another effort, led by Ken Land and the Foundation for Child Development, has developed an index of ‘child well-being,’ which attempts to provide a single number summarization of the state of children in the United Sates. Released to the public each year, the 2006 version of the scale gave child well-being a score of 102.5. The Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, a consortium of over 40 federal agencies, also produces an annual document, America’s Children, which provides a collection of “key national indicators of well-being.” Numerous data collection activities, such as the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation, also include routine data collections that focus on the status of children.

In virtually all of these activities, the most detailed level of explication available is to describe the status of children at the national level. The Annie E. Casey Foundation is a notable exception. In their yearly document, “Kids Count Data Book,” they provide a small set of indicators that allow for the comparison of states to one another.3 In most cases, however, researchers attempting to identify points of variation at the sub-national level are left with scant, or no, data. Another mitigating problem is the lack of comparability for some indicators across geographic levels such as states.