Nonprofit shares data about troubled teens with researchers

The Chronicle of Philanthropy

The one-year-old Crisis Text Line for teenagers has gathered a large amount of data based on young people’s use of the service, and is making that data available (with no information that could identify individuals) to the public. Staff members at the text line offer crisis counseling to teenagers who contact them by text, and some patterns have started to emerge. For instance, the peak period for messages about self-harm is between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m. Crisis Text Line has aggregated some of its findings in a public, online dataset, and has invited researchers interested in exploring the data more deeply to apply for access to the full collection. Professors from several major universities have already begun the process. “A lot of people are interested because there just isn’t data available on teens in crisis,” said Bob Filbin, chief data scientist at Crisis Text Line.

Spark Extra! Look at some early trends in the Crisis Text Line public dataset.