Where are the vulnerable children? Identification and comparison of clusters of young children with health and developmental vulnerabilities across Queensland

Abstract

This study aimed to better understand the vulnerability of children in their first year of school, aged between 5 years 5 months and 6 years 6 months, based on five health and development domains. Identification of subgroups of children within these domains can lead to more targeted policies to reduce these vulnerabilities. The focus of this study was to determine clusters of geographical regions with high and low proportions of vulnerable children in Queensland, Australia. This was achieved by carrying out a K-means analysis on data from the Australian Early Development Census and the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The clusters were then compared with respect to their geographic locations and risk factor profiles. The results are made publicly available via an interactive dashboard application developed in R Shiny.; Competing Interests: All authors have read and approved this version of the article and declared that they have no competing financial or non-financial interests to disclose. (Copyright: © 2024 Draidi Areed et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)