Module 5 - Analytical Data

This week's lab was an introduction/precursor to our final project. The objective of the lab was to practice the use of several different data visualization techniques. These techniques included bar charts, scatter charts, and pie charts, as well as the design of communicating materials that combine maps and other graphics (i.e. the charts). To begin, we had to choose two sets of normalized variables from County Health Ranks & Road Maps 2018 data. The two variables I chose to explore were the percentage of smokers and the percentage of individuals who reported fair/poor health. The reason for choosing these two variables is that smoking has been a major health issue for a while now. It may not be as big of an issue as obesity and heart disease, but with the rise of e-cigarette usage in more and more individuals are smoking I wanted to explore the correlation between smoking and fair/poor health reporting to see how much smoking is impacting the reporting of that variable. To best present this data I created two choropleth maps each depicting their corresponding variable. I went with an orange-to-red high-contrasting hue to direct attention to the high values of fair/poor health being reported. For the smokers map I went with a varying degree of green color hues to showcase smoking areas, seeing how tobacco is a green color I thought it would be best to depict the map as such. I also made it so that the darker the color, the higher the concentration of tobacco smokers located in that county. The charts I showcased are a scatterplot, bar chart, and pie chart. For the scatterplot, I made the y-axis Poor/Fair Health % and the x-axis adult smoking %. By formatting it this way it is easy to spot any correlation between the two variables. The bar chart highlights the top three countries with the highest and lowest smoking percentages and their corresponding health percentages. This helps the reader visually see the correlation between the highest and lowest values to see the drastic difference. The pie chart depicts the 2018 percentage breakdown of tobacco users to non-tobacco users. While what I wanted to do was showcase what products that 19.7% were made of via the pie chart, I wasn’t sure how to go about doing that. The percentages of those products also don’t add up to 19.70% because respondents reported multiple tobacco product uses, so to combat that I added the percentages and added a note to give the reader more clarity on what is being presented. I made sure the infographic utilized complementary color schemes throughout the maps and charts and ensured that the colors remained consistent with what the data presented on the charts. I opted to use a consistent sans-serif font throughout and reserved boldness for headers and subtitles. Overall I'm pretty proud of my resulting infographic but I know it can be improved upon significantly with more research into the subject variables I chose. Here is the Infographic: