Infant Mortality is a growing issue in the United States especially among Black women. However, these disparities are multiplied when you examine it amongst other social stratifications. Specifically, I examined race and geographic location to highlight the major disparities in infant mortality. Those from rural communities and black women have a greater rate of infant mortality compared to other counties and racial groups.
Data was retrieved from the Maryland State Health Department website. I was seeking data that showed racial disparities in infant mortality and geographic disparities in infant mortality. From this, I created a data frame and a graphical visualization to compare both the racial and geographical disparities in infant mortality. The goal of this project is to visually display that Black women and their babies are at a substantially higher risk of dying compared to other races. This is even more evident in the geographic differences in infant mortality rates. By creating this project, it will add to the discussion and education for improving complications and mortality rates among Black women and their babies.
This project was created with:
- R Studio Version 1.2.
- R Console 3.6.3
- 2015 Mac with 4GB running macOS Catalina Version 10.15.3
Install the following packages
In addition the following packages were installed via the console in R Studio:
> install.packages("tidyverse")
> install.packages("DataExplorer")
> install.packages("devtools")
> install.packages("dplyr")
> install.packages("ggplot2")
> install.packages("ggrepel")
> install.packages("lubridate")
> install.packages("plyr")
Additional packages and descriptions of what they do can be found here:
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/available_packages_by_date.html
Below are links to additional R Studio setup help:
https://www.dummies.com/programming/r/how-to-install-and-configure-rstudio/
The issue of infant mortality is still prevalent across the United States. Thus, this study can be expanded to compare across states and within communities. It can also be updated to compare infant mortalty rates based on income, education, and state programs.
The following pages were used in troubleshooting and creating this project:
- https://www.datanovia.com/en/lessons/reorder-data-frame-rows-in-r/
- https://www.datanovia.com/en/blog/ggplot-title-subtitle-and-caption/
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52522565/git-is-not-working-after-macos-update-xcrun-error-invalid-active-developer-pa/52761902#52761902
- https://www.datanovia.com/en/blog/ggplot-legend-title-position-and-labels/
A blog post was created to display the visualizations created with this project Check it out here:
https://defystats.wordpress.com/2020/05/22/giving-birth-while-black/