Day X: Health Equity

SDS 189: Data and Social Justice

Lindsay Poirier
Statistical & Data Sciences, Smith College

Fall 2023

Vital Statistics

• Data about a population gathered from government documents
• Includes birth records, adoption records, marriage records, divorce records, and death records

What are some of the issues that Krieger points out with public health data?

What case does Krieger make for including socio-economic information in vital statistics?

CDC Underlying Cause of Death: What counts?

• Denotative Reading
• Connotative Reading
• Deconstructive Reading

What’s the history behind how pregnancy deaths have been counted?

What is suppressed and why?

Review WONDER FORM

Individual vs. Aggregate Data

• Individual
• Aggregate

• Every row refers to one case.
• Details about one student
• Reponses to one survey
• Variables describe something about that individual case

• Rows summarize something across a series of cases.
• Statistics about one county
• Summaries of survey responses
• Variables summarize something across a series of cases (e.g. counts, averages, etc.)
  

Filtering vs. Grouping

• Filtering subsets data
  • Narrows data down to only cases that meet a particular criteria
• Grouping data takes individual records and groups them according to common criteria
  • We often group by particular classifications (e.g. group data by sex, gender, race)
  • We can report totals, averages, differences etc. within each grouping