Monday, November 30, 2015

Choosing a research question

1) After analyzing the 5 available data sets, I decided to work with Gapminder.

2) The topic that I chose to work with was suicide.

3) Codebook is created (see below)

4) The second variable I will try to related to suicide is income per person.

5) My central question would be: How suicide rates relate to income per person?

6) Literature review:
I searched for "suicide" + "personal income" at Google Scholar. These are the main results: 
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL VS SOCIOECONOMIC HYPOTHESES ON THE EPIDEMIOLOGY OF SUICIDE: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY: http://www.amsciepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2466/pr0.1996.79.3.707
How will the financial crisis affect health? http://www.bmj.com/content/338/bmj.b1314.full

In general, these studies suggest that people in depts / with financial problems are more likely to commit suicide than those with high income.

7) My hypothesis will be that a larger average income is associated with a higher suicide rate (even though the literature review might suggest the opposite).

Simplified Codebook: 

Variable name: incomeperperson
Description of indicator: 2010 Gross Domestic Product per capita in constant 2000 US$. The inflation but not the differences in the cost of living between countries has been taken into account
Main source: World Bank Work Development Indicators

Variable name: suicideper100TH
Description of indicator: 2005 Suicide, age adjusted, per 100 000 
Mortality due to self-inflicted injury, per 100 000 standard population, age adjusted
Main source: Combination of time series from WHO Violence and Injury Prevention (VIP) and data from WHO Global Burden of Disease 2002 and 2004


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