Here at the Prevention Center one of our many services is a 24-hour parental stress line called the TALKLine, where parents can find a supportive, reflective listener to help them process their parenting challenges. The line received 7,179 calls last year alone. As an organization we’re focused on collecting data and making decisions based on what we collect. So I decided to take a closer look at our caller data. I was curious to see what our callers most pressing needs are and how those needs have changed over the last year.
A few months ago I started experimenting with Tableau, a leading business intelligence tool that allows even data rookies like myself to visualize information and make interactive graphs. Not surprisingly, I found that some concerns (namely school and finances) follow seasonal patterns — school concerns spiked in August, while parents expressed challenges with finances around July and December.
In effort to accommodate our community’s collective times of concern we’ve begun to recruit and train new volunteers in September (before the holidays hit) and May (as summer begins and before the school year starts).
When looking through the data, what surprised me was the wide variety of concerns that parents encounter regularly throughout the year — from legal issues to substance abuse, self care, and suicidality.
These graphs are interactive, so click on the graph / link below to explore the data and feel what it’s like to be a social-good data analyst!
