Section 1.8 Case Studies
Throughout this specialization, we’re going to make use of a number of case studies from Open Case Studies to demonstrate the concepts introduced in the course. We will generally make use of the same case studies throughout the specialization, providing continuity to allow you focus on the concepts and skills being taught (rather than the context) while working with interesting data. These case studies aim to address a public-health question and all of them use real data.
Subsection 1.8.1 Case Study #1: Health Expenditures
The material for this first case study comes from the following:
Kuo, Pei-Lun and Jager, Leah and Taub, Margaret and Hicks, Stephanie. (2019, February 14). opencasestudies/ocs-healthexpenditure: Exploring Health Expenditure using State-level data in the United States (Version v1.0.0). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2565307
Health policy in the United States of America is complicated, and several forms of health care coverage exist, including that of federal government-led health care programs and that of private insurance companies. We are interested in getting sense of the health expenditure, including health care coverage and health care spending, across the United States. More specifically, the questions are:
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Is there a relationship between health care coverage and health care spending in the United States?
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How does the spending distribution change across geographic regions in the United States?
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Does the relationship between health care coverage and health care spending in the United States change from 2013 to 2014?
Subsubsection 1.8.1.1 Data: health care
The two datasets used in this case study come from the Henry J Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) and include:
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Health Insurance Coverage of the Total Population - Includes years 2013-2016
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Health Care Expenditures by State of Residence (in millions) - Includes years 1991-2014
Subsection 1.8.2 Case Study #2: Firearms
The material for the second case study comes from the following:
Stephens, Alexandra and Jager, Leah and Taub, Margaret and Hicks, Stephanie. (2019, February 14). opencasestudies/ocs-police-shootings-firearm-legislation: Firearm Legislation and Fatal Police Shootings in the United States (Version v1.0.0). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2565249
In the United States, firearm laws differ by state. Additionally, police shootings are frequently in the news. Understanding the relationship between firearm laws and police shootings is of public health interest.
A recent study set out "to examine whether stricter firearm legislation is associated with rates of fatal police shootings". We’ll use the state-level data from this study about firearm legislation and fatal police shootings in this case study.
Subsubsection 1.8.2.1 Question
The main question from this case study is: At the state-level, what is the relationship between firearm legislation strength and annual rate of fatal police shootings?
Subsubsection 1.8.2.2 Data
To accomplish this in this case study, we’ll use data from a number of different sources:
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The Brady Campaign State Scorecard 2015: numerical scores for firearm legislation in each state.
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The Counted: Persons killed by police in the US. The Counted project started because “the US government has no comprehensive record of the number of people killed by law enforcement.”
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Education data for 2010 via the US Census education table editor.
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Household firearm ownership rates - by using the percentage of firearm suicides to all suicides as a proxy (as this was used in the above referenced study) that we are trying to replicate. This data is downloaded from the CDC’s Web-Based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System.
