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Mission Oriented Statistics

Mission oriented statistics are data focused on characteristics that are directly related to the to the vision and mission of the planning effort, which might include population information, current economic trends, sociological characteristics or other information. The data that a community analyst could collect can cover a vast number of topics. Because data is more plentiful than the analysts time, typically it is organized to describe particular dimensions of the community. For example, the analyst can focus data collection on:

• Demographic Data: both broadly based data like population, age cohorts, population projections and migration and data focused on significant population segments like child and family data, seniors, families in poverty and so on.
• Economic Data: statistics on the industrial and commercial base in general like establishments, jobs and salary; or on
  business sectors in particular such as the retail sector, the energy sector, the agriculture sector, the tourism sector etc.
  

One example of this approach is the approach is the Data for Decision Makers* series from the Iowa State University Extension http://www.extension.iastate.edu/pubs/D4D.html [cited June 15, 2004] :

• The Data for Decision Makers (DD) files contain data on population demographics, education, retail sales, personal income, employment, occupation, housing, and family characteristics.
• The Employment and Earnings Data for Decision Makers (EEDD) files contain information on the working population and earnings in each county.
• The Agricultural Data for Decision Makers contains information on agriculture and statistical profiles of farming in a county.
• The Retail Trade Data for Decision Makers contains recent information profiling retail trade in a county.
• The Child and Family Data for Decision Makers (CFDD) files contain data on population, demographics, employment of parents, family income and poverty levels in each county.
• The Older Iowans Data for Decision Makers (OIDD) files contain information on the population aged 55 and older, including income, employment and housing data.