Homework #8: Planning to Plan
Exploring datasets this week caused me to go down several hours-long rabbit holes into places I didn’t even know existed and data I had no clue was even being collected. I’m currently a little overwhelmed by all of the viable options for my final, but I think I’ve decided to focus on teen drug use (or maybe a combination of teen drug use vs adult drug use?) just because there’s a lot of interesting and accessible data on that topic from a variety of different sources.
On of the most promising sources I found for this topic was the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This survey seemed to contain tons of valuable data (everything from drug use, sexual activity, dietary behavior, violence, all organized by year and location), but I was unable to find a way to look at it. All of the files seemed to require an additional piece of software (none were excel files), and even reading through the 20+ page user guide for each data set was unable to help me open it. Once I find a way to access this data — if there is one — I’m sure it’ll become a very valuable resource to me.
Using Google’s database search I found a series of data sets from the National Center of Education Statistics. One of their pages contained links to different data sets (and thankfully their excel files) covering literally every topic related to education I could think of. There’s detailed data about teen drug and alcohol use, but also about teacher salaries, developmental skills, and state regulations. The data was organized in a very straightforward way and was extremely easy to understand. Almost every survey I looked at contained information about race, gender, sexuality, and location as well. The breadth of this data is really exciting to me, I’m hoping to use it in my final to compare seemingly disparate data sets to see if there’s any correlation. Does school funding effect the drug use rates in that area? Does the teachers’ pay? How does the secondary data compare to the post-secondary data?
I was also able to find an interesting study from the National Addiction and HIV Data Archive Program focusing on the effectiveness of drug abuse treatment in adolescents. Similar to the YRBSS data, I was unable to access any of it because there wasn’t an option to download it as an excel file. I’m going to try to find a way to access this data because it seems really interesting — there’s the participants answer to the survey questions but also data from urine tests (do they contradict?).
Similarly, the National Archive for Social Justice Data has some great data on what types of drugs adolescents are using and at what rates. Unfortunately, I ran into the same issue as before when attempting to download and open the data.
My goal for this week is to figure out how to access these types of data files.