Abstract:
Knowledge Lab is a microsimulation model of New Zealand children’s development from birth to age 21. Micro-simulation is a technique that creates a virtual world which mimics the real world, with the population of ‘virtual’ individuals looking very much like the population of real individuals – in our case, children developing from birth through to early adulthood. A key feature of microsimulation is that allows virtual experiments to be carried out, where the effects of changing aspects of children’s lives can be simulated, and the results quantified. What if we could reduce child bullying? What if fewer children had ear infections? What if we could improve the diet and activity of children? How would children’s lives improve as a result of these changes? These are the sorts of questions Knowledge Lab has been set up to answer. To construct Knowledge Lab, we first identified key determinants of child and adolescent outcomes, in association with policy representative from the New Zealand Ministries of Health, Education, Social Development and Justice, as well as Te Puni Kōkiri, the Social Policy Evaluation and Research Unit (SuPERU), and the Children’s Commission. We then integrated estimates from systematic reviews and meta-analyses for the impact of these determinants into a working micro-simulation model of the early life-course, building on an earlier microsimulation model we had developed: Modelling the Early life-course. Steps in this process have involved (i) identifying published systematic reviews and meta analyses relating to key outcomes for children and adolescents (to age 21); (ii) integrating estimates from these studies into, and thus enhancing, an existing micro-simulation model of the early life-course; (iii) validating the enhanced model, and thus published estimates, by comparing simulated results to published New Zealand benchmarks; and (iv) using the validated enhanced model to test the impact of various policies on key child and adolescent outcomes. The end product is an expert decision-support tool that is available for use by the public policy community. This tool have been developed as an interactive web application using Shiny R package and R programming language. Thus, the Shiny app can be shared as a web page, which allows the user to run across a number of different platforms, and does not require any specialist software to be installed.