Earlier this year we launched the RAYSE Index (Reaching All Youth Strengthens Engagement), which embodies CIRCLE’s vision that research data can and should enhance the quantity, equality, and impact of youth civic engagement.

The RAYSE Index is designed to inform program and outreach investment decisions (time, money, or people) by highlighting the county-level conditions, assets, and challenges to building a local ecosystem of support for ALL youth to have opportunities for engagement. The RAYSE Rating given to each county reflects its potential for growth in youth civic engagement.

This fall, we updated the RAYSE Index to include data from the 2016 election. The resulting map of RAYSE Rating data shows the varied conditions that exist for support of youth civic engagement across the country.

Explore the RAYSE Index

What’s Updated

• Our calculations for the Potential Youth Influence on Elections Index, one of the core indices that make up the RAYSE Rating, now include 2016 election data . This includes county-level youth voter registration and voter turnout data for 18 to29-year-olds. In addition to the youth population share for a county, these data points provide some indication of how much influence young people in the county could possibly have on electoral races.
• The Electoral History filter (on the left-hand sidebar) now includes options for which presidential candidate won each county in 2016, in addition to previous options for 2008 and 2012. The filters allow for creating a targeted list of counties; for example, the RAYSE Index can shows us that there were seven counties won by Mitt Romney in 2012 and by Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Coming Soon

In order to provide the most relevant data on conditions for civic engagement, the RAYSE Index is based on many separate datasets from which we selected and combined the indicators that correlated most strongly with youth engagement.  This fall, we will allow RAYSE Index users to download the data for these individual, relevant indicators in much the same way they can already download the index data.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 31st, 2017 at 3:08 pm and is filed under CIRCLE Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.