The number of disconnected youth in a community is a good indicator of how that community is preparing its youth for a transition to adulthood. Disconnected youth often are not able to build their toolkit of skills for employment and often do not have the adequate social capital to fall back on in crisis situations. Because of these trends, disconnected youth are at a higher risk of experiencing homelessness or participating in criminal activity.
Louisville currently ranks 9th among its peers in rates of disconnected youth with a rate of 7.1%. A young person aged 16 to 24 is considered disconnected if they are neither working nor in school.
Louisville ranks among the top tier of its peer cities on this metric according to a natural breaks algorithm. Cities in green are those that outperform their peers, cities in yellow represent the middle cluster, and those in red are a group that lags behind its peers on this indicator.
The rate of disconnected youth in Louisville has been rapidly decreasing relative to its peers since it reached a maximum in 2012. Louisville has reduced its rate of disconnected youth from above its peer city average in 2012 to below its peer city average in 2015.
For each indicator, Greater Louisville Project assigns cities into one of three groups (high-performing, middle-of-the-pack, and low-performing) based on how they compare to other cities. The assignment is based on how cities naturally cluster on that indicator. Sometimes, the differences between cities are very small, and the difference between a city ranked 5th and 6th could simply be a matter of the sampling error that arises from using survey data. Thus, rather than always make a division that declares the top 5 to be the top tier, we use a natural breaks algorithm to look for a cluster of cities that is outperforming the rest, a cluster that is about average, and a cluster that is lagging. This clustering gives us a better indication of where Louisville is thriving and where Louisville has room to learn from cities that are doing better.
Z-scores (or standardization) is a way to combine data with different units of measurement into a single index. The z-score is a measure of how far away a city (or census tract, etc.) is from the average city. In order to be comparable across different units of measurement, the z-score is the distance from the mean measured in standard deviations (e.g. if Louisville has a z-score of 1 it means Louisville is 1 standard deviation above the mean of its peer cities).
Data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's County Health Rankings use z-scores and all z-scores are relative to the mean of Louisville's peer cities. (On the County Health Rankings site z-scores are relative to all the counties in each state - thus z-scores reported by GLP will be different, because we are using a different reference group). The Greater Louisville Project also uses z-scores in our multidimensional poverty index, which compares each census tract to the mean of all census tracts in Louisville.
