Determinants and Impact of Obesity Rates in New York — Data Analysis & Visualization
This artifact is from a term project completed in H303, Health Administration Data Analysis. Using County Health Rankings data, I created scatter plots, correlation analyses, and regression outputs in Excel to examine the relationships between obesity and five key variables: food environment, smoking rates, income ratio, children in poverty, and access to exercise opportunities.
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What I learned
I chose this assignment because it pushed me to apply real data analysis skills to a public health issue. Working through regression outputs and scatter plots in Excel helped me understand how social determinants of health actually show up in the data, not just in theory. The finding that stood out most to me was that smoking rates had the strongest positive correlation with obesity at 0.73, which I did not expect going in. This project showed me how data can tell a story about health inequity in a way that words alone cannot.
Program Competencies
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Describe the structure and functioning of health delivery, public health, and health services organizations and the importance of a population health perspective.
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Apply quality, strategic planning, management, organizational behavior, marketing, and human resource theories and tools to manage organizational resources, confront industry challenges and improve outcomes in health organizations.
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Apply data and health information technology to inform organizational performance and decision making.